Biometrics and Healthcare Data Integrity
Yesterday, Becker’s Hospital Review published an article written by M2SYS entitled “Is Biometrics the Answer to Healthcare Data Integrity?” As healthcare slowly moves towards full scale adoption of electronic medical records and this digitization manifests into the creation of health information exchanges, more health IT professionals are worried about how to effectively manage healthcare data integrity to ensure quality and accuracy. Healthcare data corruption issues pose a serious problem since both patients and physicians need the confidence that the information they see is complete, current, accurate, and secure.
It will take a collective effort from the entire healthcare industry to establish a healthcare information exchange system built on quality and accurate data. The logical first step in the process is incorporating technology that ensures patient identification accuracy. Healthcare biometrics patient identification systems are increasingly gaining traction within the industry because of their ability to maintain accuracy between a patient’s identity and their medical record information. In addition as the article states,
“…certain biometric modalities abide by data standardization guidelines set forth by government non-regulatory agencies. Iris biometric patient identification templates, for example, are compliant with National Institute of Standards and Technology standardization and have been extensively tested and certified as generic, shared data across disparate networks.”
The ability of healthcare biometrics patient identification systems to help save capital and resources is another focus of the article. Increasing patient identification accuracy to stop preventable medical errors and duplicate medical records not only helps save money and time, but it also strengthens data integrity to prevent a chain reaction of errors across networks that can lead to irreversible physical damage and possibly even death.
The use of biometrics for patient identification will continue to play an important role in molding the healthcare information exchange construct and maintain data integrity across networks that will share invaluable patient medical data.
