Biometrics can ensure healthcare data integrity
According to John Trader, Public Relations and Marketing Manager at M2SYS Technology in an article in Becker’s Hospital Review, the healthcare industry is enhancing efficiencies and quality of patient care by using biometrics for accurate patient identification.
Hospitals and healthcare systems have been rapidly moving to electronic health records. As they move and coordinate care across networks through health information exchanges, information systems can become highly susceptible to corruption or unauthorized entry.
Such intrusions reduce privacy and can even become a matter of life and death for patients if information is compromised.
Health information exchanges work across an entire ecosystem of institutions and facilities, so it is not just about one company or one hospital, but about a collective and cost-effective effort from all healthcare providers across the industry.
Health information exchanges rely on data integrity that originates in accurate patient identification. Because it is important to maintain data integrity across the network, precise patient identification is crucial to make sure that the right care is given to the right patient.
Thus, patient’s data need to be complete, updated, accurate, secure and properly linked across systems.
In a 2009 research study, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society found that: “A local system with a poorly maintained or ‘dirty’ master patient index will only proliferate and contaminate all of the other systems to which it links.”
There are certain standards set in the use of biometrics to establish “patient identity integrity.” One technology that is compliant with the standards set by the National Institute of Standards and Technology is the iris biometric patient identification template.
Establishing a unique biometric template linked to one medical record, helps to not just positively identify patients but prevent duplication of medical records and provides protection against medical identity theft.
Iris biometrics has been extensively tested. It is used to establish ‘patient identity integrity’ upon admission and during a patient’s stay for reliable and authentic data for use by the network.
The Joint Commission, an independent, not-for-profit organization that accredits and certifies more than 19,000 health care organizations and programs in the United States, has recognized using biometrics at patient touch points to support healthcare patient identification protocols.
Using biometrics accurately identifies patients, saves hospitals billions of dollars per year, and mitigates medical errors and their costly consequences.
Does using biometrics to positively identify patients lead to better quality care?
Article Topics
biometrics | data protection | healthcare | HIPAA | iris recognition | NIST | secure identification
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11 Replies to “Biometrics can ensure healthcare data integrity”
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RT @biometricupdate: #Biometrics can ensure #healthcare data integrity. http://t.co/CAbaWTTW
RT @biometricupdate: #Biometrics can ensure #healthcare data integrity. http://t.co/Jh7eA2KA
Biometrics can ensure healthcare data integrity http://t.co/BpdQfr1V #biometrics #data protection #identification
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I wonder if the modelling is available behind the conclusion that “billions of dollars per year” will be saved by #biometric 1:N identification?
I’ve asked one of the vendors some pretty straightforward questions, of interest to hospital administrators, but there are no answers.
– What is an acceptable False Match Rate for large scale 1:N biometrics?
– Will they say what the actual FMR and FNMR are for the system?
– Do they know how well it performs when different vendors’ sensors are used for enrollment and later verification?
Ambit claims are readily made for biometrics but it’s surprisingly hard to get specific performance data. It’s quite a double standard; other branches of Information Security are more transparent. http://lockstep.com.au/blog/biometrics
In a biometric enrolment trial that was commissioned by the UK Passport Service in partnership with the Home Office Identity Cards Programme and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA), a false acceptance probability of 99.995% was found. False acceptance is the measure of the likelihood that the biometric security system will incorrectly accept an access attempt by an unauthorized user. This means in their test, one out of 10,000 biometric scans would be accepted in error. Saving billions of dollars in an industry would depend on the acceptability of the error rate and how the error is processed and handled. The trial found that identification is vastly more demanding than verification, and even for moderate database sizes, merely “good” verifiers are of no use as identifiers. Of course, as I had stated elsewhere on BiometricUpdate.com, there is no denying that governments need to work on the reliability of biometric documents and access systems, especially passport reliability.
Rawlson, the calculations from the lecture material you cited show that for a “good” verifier with a trial-by-trial accuracy of 99.9%, the probability of at least one False Match when trying 1:N identification against a 10,000 candidates is 99.995%, i.e. near certainty. The lecture notes conclude that ‘merely “good” verifiers are of no use as identifiers”.
The trial-by-trial accuracy of 99.9% is hypothetical. The different day different vendor accuracy is likely to be worse. Iris is held up to be the best biometric with error rates of 1 in a million (e.g. slide 5 in your lecture notes) but these benchmarks are always taken from single vendor systems, with strong lighting control as with immigrations systems. The vendors tend not to reveal the real world performance.
M2SYS advocates 1:N identification biometric identification in federated HIE systems where the populations are left to the imagination but we can safely assume they will exceed 100,000.
If we accept your expert (Dr. Andrzej Drygajlo) on the point that “merely good” is not goo enough, then it is incumbent on the vendor to tell us what the accuracy of their system really is. T
oo much detail in biometrics discussion is left to the imagination.
RT @armorvox: Biometrics can ensure healthcare data integrity http://t.co/gVvlBwEA #biometrics #data protection #identification