Simprints celebrates scale of biometrically verified health services in 2024

Biometrics non-profit Simprints says it delivered more than 551,000 biometrically verified health services including vaccines, surgeries, and deworming treatments across its global operations in 2024.

The UK firm disclosed the figures in its 2024 Impact Review released recently.

It described 2024 as a year of “deep impact, innovation, and global partnerships,” where a total of 655,679 unique individuals were offered different healthcare services, be it in Bangladesh, Ghana or Ethiopia where they respectively ran toddler vaccine pilot, child immunization and care delivery projects.

According to the Impact Review summary, the success recorded by Simprints went a long way in not only facilitating health care intervention by frontline staff, but also improving the accuracy and speed of patient identification, representing “an essential chapter in our mission to transform how the world fights poverty and disease.”

The impact of Simprints’ work, the review notes, underpins the values of scalability and affordability of their services with the cost of biometric verification per beneficiary cost as low as 20¢ (USD).

Citing specific country success points, Simprints explained that face biometrics was used to identify patients in Ethiopia with the verification process completed in less than one minute, while patient identification accuracy improved to 98.3 percent in Ghana.

Still in Ethiopia, the deduplication system helped reduce duplicate entries from 27.8 percent to 7.2 percent, with the acceptance of biometric verification among care seekers reaching almost 100 percent in 2024, up from 75 percent in 2018.

The review also mentions the Operation Sight in Ethiopia which saw faster identification of patients undergoing trachomatous trichiasis surgery, and higher user satisfaction, thanks to the integration of face biometrics into the system.

Simprints’ 2024 Impact Review follows that of 2023 which reported that the firm’s biometric technology enhanced efficiency and reach of health care and other social impact projects.

A decade of impact and digital innovation

Simprints’ 2024 Impact Review comes not long after it unveiled a film titled “Hope of Men” which highlights a decade of innovation and impact in its health care delivery projects around the world.

CEO and Co-founder Toby Norman commented at the time that their objective is to “revolutionize the fight against poverty and disease with biometric ID technology to ensure that every vaccine, dollar, and public good reaches the people who need them most.”

He said they were inspired by the struggles of frontline health workers in Bangladesh in 2015 to use biometric technology to connect digital IDs to health records, stating that “we’ve grown into a trusted biometric technical assistance partner for impact, empowering organizations to address aid and healthcare delivery challenges.”

One of the innovations Norman mentioned is the Simprints open-source Android ID app, which he said, enables “frontline workers to enrol, identify, and verify individuals using biometrics.”

He said with support from several global partners, they’ve been able to reach more than three million people in 17 countries, “reducing fraud, empowering health workers, and ensuring critical services reach their intended recipients.”

Looking ahead, Norman said they were planning to test and deploy AI deep learning models for life-saving vaccine delivery, as part of a broader objective of helping deliver essential services to at least 20 million people in Bangladesh, Ghana, Ethiopia, and beyond, by 2030.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  deduplication  |  digital identity  |  healthcare  |  identity verification  |  patient identification  |  SimPrints