The need to uniquely identify patients in a practice management or EHR system is critical. This is especially true in light of a well publicized incident with the Veterans Association (VA) and the Department of Defense.
VA officials first discovered problems with the data exchange late last month when a VA clinician found a record in AHLTA (Defense Department’s AHLTA EMR) indicating that a female patient had been prescribed a drug for erectile dysfunction. NextGov reports that the clinician’s query actually had returned the record of another patient. “The VA clinician may see the patient’s data during one session, but another session may not display the data previously seen,” the VA alert explains. “This problem occurs intermittently and has been reported when querying DoD laboratory, pharmacy and radiology reports.”
There has been a lot of discussion on using biometrics such as fingerprints, palm readers, etc to uniquely identify patients. But now there is a new technology that can read the iris of a patient’s eye. Like fingerprints, the iris provides a unique identifier. The eye scanner does not require any physical contact with the patient.
For a clinic in Bronx, NY where they have many of the same patient names and many without SSNs, the iris reader provided a perfect solution. As reported in this CNN article:
With a heavily Hispanic client base, where some of their 37,000 patients speak limited English and only a few provide Social Security numbers, the clinic encountered cases of mistaken identities.
It had 50 Maria Hernandezes, 66 Maria Gonzaleses, 55 Jose Gonzalezes, 83 Carmen Rodriguezes and 103 Jose Rodriguezes, according to the clinic.
The clinic photographed its patients, but that was imprecise. De Leon didn’t want to use fingerprints, because some patients associated that with the police and crime. He didn’t want to use palm readers that required physical contact because that would easily spread germs. So he set his sights on iris scanners; it didn’t require touching and didn’t carry the negative connotations.
The company that makes the iris scanner is Eye Controls. Evan Smith, Eye Controls’ chief executive officer says this about his technology:
“The acceptable error rate is zero, because we’re talking about people’s lives here. People can get hurt and die”
The iris, which is the colored ring of the eye, is unique for every human being. The company tested the iris scanner with simulated IDs and found zero errors in 8 million transactions.
For more information read the FierceHealthIT story
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[...] Eye scan for unique patient ID [...]