Biometrics technology tops round in CHIME National Patient ID challenge

Healthcare IT News is reporting that CHIME has named two winners of the “Concept Blitz Round” of the National Patient ID Challenge it launched with HeroX.

Launched in January, the CHIME/HeroX challenge seeks innovative ways to help U.S. providers reliably, accurately, privately and safely identify patients.

A panel of five independent judges narrowed the 113 entrants down to 23 semifinalists and then eight finalists.

The $30,000 winners of the “Concept Blitz Round” were Michael Braithwaite and Mark Schroeder. Braithwaite devised a scalable strategy that uses enhanced biometric information to match patients with their unique health data. Schroeder proposed to deploy HL7-approved standards to enable demographics and biometrics for patient ID.

The other six finalists were: Shawnnah Castillo; Kathryn Elaine; Bon Sy and Ayman Zeidan, and; teams from Mathematica Policy Research, Spiral Nebula and RightPatient.

CHIME Board Chair Marc Probst said he was encouraged and excited by some of the innovative projects submitted to the Concept Blitz Round, with so many leveraging technology that already exists and won’t require wholesale disruption of today’s IT systems. “As patients increasingly seek care across the continuum, and data moves from one care setting to another, it is vital that we ensure patients are accurately identified and matched to their records.”

The patient ID challenge now moves into the Final Innovation Round. Applicants were not required to take part in the Concept Blitz Round in order to enter the final round, but must register by July 12 to be eligible for the $1 million prize. No entry fee is required.

“We know that somewhere, right now, a patient is being harmed due to misidentification,” said CHIME CEO Russ Branzell in a statement. “We owe it to our patients to solve this problem once and for all. The solutions coming forward in this challenge are pointing us to a real solution.”

Article Topics

biometrics  |  healthcare  |  identity verification  |  patient identification  |  safety