Serious ROI in remote patient monitoring

How one health system saves $90,000 per patient (Healthcare IT News)

NAH [Northern Arizona Healthcare] saw hospitalizations drop from 3.26 mean per patient to 1.82 and days hospitalized drop from 13.98 mean per patient to 5.13 and, based on the health system's data about the first 50 patients six months prior to enrollment and six months after enrollment, that added up to savings of approximately $92,000 per patient.

The "biometrics" discussed in the article aren't biometrics for identification, but ID biometrics will certainly be a part of the picture as these kinds of technologies are adopted more widely.

Market forecast for healthcare biometrics

Biometrics in the Healthcare Industry (Tractica)

...[S]tarting from a base of $250 million in 2015, Tractica forecasts that global healthcare biometrics revenue will reach $3.5 billion by 2024, with cumulative revenue for the 10-year period totaling $12.5 billion at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 34%.

Find Biometrics conclues monthlong focus on healthcare

Healthcare Month: The Remote Care Revolution (Find Biometrics)

Biometric technology, as we outlined in this month’s primer, can be used not only for security in healthcare and patient identification but also as a way of taking the hospital home. While the former two of these technology paradigms is focused on authentication and the latter on monitoring and data analytics, they both serve to address the same larger issue in hospitals and clinics: resource efficiency.

There is a wealth of great information at FindBiometrics.com

Forecast: Global biometrics market in the healthcare industry will reach at CAGR of 31.95% by 2018

WhaTech.com

The Global Biometrics market in the Healthcare industry has also been witnessing the rapid technological advancement. However, the strong competition from inexpensive non-biometric technologies could pose a challenge to the growth of this market.

Forecast: Health care biometrics worth US $5B by 2020

Special Report: Biometrics in Healthcare (Biometric Update)

This report examines how biometric technology is applied to the health care industry, mainly in the United States. This report notes that “health care biometrics” is utilized for access control, identification, workforce management or patient record storage. Biometrics in health care often takes two forms: providing access control to resources and patient identification solutions. The growing demand for biometrics solutions is mainly driven by the need to combat fraud, along with the imperative to improve patient privacy along with health care safety. Biometrics are also increasing being used for medical monitoring and mobile health care.

- Rawlson O`Neil King Lead Researcher, Biometrics Research Group, Inc.

Also, and unlike with most of these market analyses, Biometrics Research Group has made the entire report available for free via download at the link above.

"Get me some biometrics, stat!"

How biometrics could improve health security (Fortune)

For the last two years, the health industry suffered the highest number of hackings of any sector. Last year, it accounted for 43% of all data breaches, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center. To help prevent these costly issues, medical companies have begun adopting an array of biometrics security systems that use data from a patient’s fingerprint, iris, veins, or face.

There really isn't an identity management challenge that health care doesn't have.

Ghana: Nearly 1 million biometric health insurance cards issued in Eastern Region

Eastern Region NHIS issues 979,002 biometric cards (Ghana News Agency)

Over 979,002 clients of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) in the Eastern Region had been issued with the new biometric cards.

Biometrics for secure medical records access

NSTIC pilot uses biometrics to bring identity management to seniors (Fierce Government IT)

Members of AARP, a nonprofit group that serves adults 50 years or older, are testing technology to help them better manage their digital identities in a simple, but more secure way using biometrics. It's just one of 15 federally funded pilots that was recently highlighted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Ghana: Praise for biometric health insurance scheme

Government has been commended for giving full backing to the Biometric Registration System adopted recently by the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) to ensure greater patronage. (Spy Ghana) — the new system has completely abolished the three months waiting period which, hitherto, newly –registered members had to go through before getting their membership Cards.

Biometrics for vaccination records

Scanning babies fingerprints could save lives (Michigan State Univ.)

Each year 2.5 million children die worldwide because they do not receive life-saving vaccinations at the appropriate time.

Anil Jain, Michigan State University professor, is developing a fingerprint-based recognition method to track vaccination schedules for infants and toddlers, which will increase immunization coverage and save lives.

Operation ASHA has been using biometrics for tuberculosis treatment, too.

Never a good headline

We’re Not In Crisis –NHIA (Peace FM)

In January this year, the NHIA introduced the ‘instant issuance’ of health insurance Identification (ID) Card system based on biometric data.

The process began as a roll-out in the Greater Accra region after a pilot of it on the security personnel (Military and police) in two districts of the Region-Ayawaso and La.

Currently, the process has been extended to the Central and Eastern Regions respectively and the Ashanti Region will be the next to join instant issuance of the ID cards regime.

There's a reason national health services worldwide are scrambling to apply biometric ID management techniques to service delivery. Biometrics deliver bottom-line financial benefit to health care systems in significant ways. Better ID means less fraud, fewer ghost patients and a better audit trail if a provider's activities warrant investigation. Also, better patient ID leads to better patient outcomes and better records management.

It's not surprising that countries like Ghana are choosing to leap-frog the 20th century systems other large health care providers use, but it also isn't surprising that the process is difficult and requires a steady managerial hand.

UNITED STATES: Feds Begin Fingerprinting 'High Risk' Medicare Providers and Suppliers (Weekly Standard)

Health Care seems to have every single identity management challenge there is. — Biometric technology has a major role to play in healthcare: here’s why (memeburn)

According to a new market report published by Transparency Market Research  the global healthcare biometrics market was valued at USD 1.2 billion in 2012 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 25.9% from 2013 to 2019, to reach an estimated value of USD 5.8 billion in 2019. (Press Release)

TECH WORLD: Cambridge students look to create fingerprint scanner for rural healthcare — Great app, but it seems more like a software & integration project. Hardware isn't the reason you don't see more projects like this. The culprits are interoperability and stove-piping, for starters.

Patient ID in the United States

Identifying Solutions to Patient ID (HealthLeaders)

Patient identification is a fundamental building block of the emerging accountable care organization trend, according to Bill Spooner, CIO of Sharp HealthCare, which operates four acute care and three specialty care hospitals with an approximate total of 2,000 licensed beds in the San Diego region.

"The important thing is to be able to get accurately identified patients into your database and to be able to link them out to your transaction systems so everybody knows who they are so you can effectively engage in care management," Spooner says.

The United States in particular faces a hurdle that other developed countries do not: By law, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is prohibited from establishing a national patient identifier.

Providers are coping in several ways. Technology exists to flag suspected duplicate identities with varying degrees of certainty. Some are turning to technology offered by suppliers of their electronic health records.

Other providers are relying upon technology that has been employed by payers for years. And for those systems that can make the technological jump, patients are now being positively identified during every visit using smart cards with photo IDs attached, or even by biometric means, such as fingerprint, palm, or retinal scans. [ed. The revolution will not be retinal scans; bold emphasis mine]

Bottom line:
"If you can't uniquely identify your patients within whatever data you're analyzing, you're going to misread and therefore make executive decisions that are not spot-on,[a]nd you make some big strategic mistakes because of that."

The lengthy piece is very much worth a longer look.

Biometrics for patient ID gaining momentum

Biometric technology combats medical identity theft (Business Week)

Data breaches at hospitals may cost the U.S. health-care industry as much as $7 billion a year, according to the Ponemon Institute, a Michigan-based organization that studies privacy, data protection, and security. And that doesn’t count the unknown cost of fraudulent use of information from lost or stolen insurance cards and drivers licenses. HCA Holdings (HCA) hospitals in London and many U.S. providers have a solution: using biometric technology to verify patient identities. “If you don’t have a good way of authenticating legitimate users,” says Ponemon Chairman Larry Ponemon, “whatever you do on the other side isn’t going to be good enough.”

Biometric devices that recognize people’s physical traits—think iris scanners or palm vein readers—are no longer the stuff of spy movies or border control.

A look at biometrics and health care fraud

Iris Scans Seen Shrinking $7 Billion Medical Data Breach (Bloomberg)

Iris scanners aren’t just for airport border-control agents and spy movies anymore.

Clinics and hospitals around the world are acquiring technology that identifies people based on physical traits to improve patient safety and stamp out fraud. HCA Holdings Inc. (HCA) hospitals in London, as well as health-care providers across the U.S., are buying so-called biometric technologies.

There's not an identity management problem hospitals don't have.

Biometrics for newborns in hospital maternity units?

Maha govt asks hospitals to ensure biometric ID of infants (IBN Live)

In order to prevent thefts of babies from hospitals, the Maharashtra government has asked state-run medical centres to ensure biometric identification of infants within two hours of birth.

As far as I know, it's easier to apply biometric identity management techniques to the adults who have a right remove a baby from a hospital than it is to biometrically account for the identity of each infant. Face recognition doesn't work very well on infants and newborns aren't going to be able to help with the more participatory biometric modalities like iris and finger even if the algorithms are applicable to infant morphology (and I'm not sure that they are).

Footprints have been collected from newborns for a long time, but even though human experts can match properly executed paper and ink footprints, I'm not aware of any matching algorithms for the foot to automate that process.

So that leaves biometrics for the adults that are allowed in the maternity ward including parents/soon-to-be parents and a special category for individuals that are allowed to remove a newborn from hospital property: new parents exclusively.

Granted, that won't prevent baby mix-ups, but it can go a long way to making baby theft much more difficult.

In a more passive approach, SecurLinx has experience providing facial recognition capabilities to monitor a watch list of individuals restrained from approaching a maternity wing.

If anyone out there has any information on biometric algorithms intended for use on newborns, please send it along.

Brazilian ghost doctors have rubber fingers

Note: all links in this post go to Portuguese language sources. Translations are a collaboration between Google and me.

My brother in São Paulo tipped me off to a rubber finger scandal in the Greater S.P. health service.

Doctor busted in SP for falsifying colleagues fingerprints with silicone (Floha de S. Paulo - Portuguese)

A doctor was arrested red-handed on Sunday, March 10 for using silicone fingers to fake the fingerprints use to mark the attendance of colleagues. She and the other doctors are employees of Samu Service (Emergency Medical Care) for Ferraz de Vasconcelos, in Greater São Paulo.

According to police, Thauane Nunes Ferreira, 28, registered the attendance of 11 doctors and 20 nurses. She told police she practiced the irregularity because she was coerced by her boss. 

Greater SP: Doctors suspected of faking attendance are removed (Floha de S. Paulo - Portuguese)

Six Samu Service (Emergency Medical Care) doctors  in Ferraz de Vasconcelos, Greater São Paulo, paid R$ 4,800 [ed. $2,450 US] to the coordinator of the service in the city, Jorge Luiz Cury, in order to avoid working four 24-hours shifts per month for which they were paid, City Hall says. Police are investigating the case. The city pulled the servers allegedly involved in the fraud.

The day before yesterday [ed. see above], when the scheme was discovered, doctor Thauane Nunes Ferreira, 28, was arrested in the act of using mock fingers with silicone fingerprints to mark the attendance of six colleagues.

Where they have been adopted, biometrics have made ghostbusting easier. In this case, with time-and-attendance biometrics deployed someone had to create and use 31 rubber fingers (pictured at both links above). That draws attention. Without biometrics, scaling up the time-and-attendance fraud while decreasing the risk of detection would have been much easier. If this allegedly corrupt boss was willing to go up to at least 31 rubber fingers, how many paper employees would he have tried?


According to Wikipedia, Ferraz de Vasconcelos, where the fraud took place, is second-poorest of Greater São Paulo's 39 municipalities. Congratulations to all involved for stopping this instance of the corrupt stealing resources meant to provide health care to people far less fortunate than the doctors and administrators involved.

UPDATE:
[Via] Drudge and the BBC are now on the story. If you didn't want to wade through the Portuguese pieces linked above, you may be interested in these.

UPDATE II:
Upon closer examination of the the photos of the fake fingers used, another thought comes to mind. It certainly appears as though the fake fingers were created with the participation of their owners, making them evidence for the prosecution that they were complicit in the fraud.  As it is, the fake fingers used in the fraud come from a variety of live finger models. In the two examples pictured below, the one on the left appears to belong to a male and the one on the right appears to belong to a female. If the counterfeiter wasn't working from live models, there would be no reason to add a fingernail to the back of the fake finger.

Image edited from original photo at Folha de S. Paulo

Had the doctors' prints been somehow lifted via subterfuge and placed onto a silicone finger without their knowledge, we might expect all of the fake fingers to look very similar as the finger counterfeiter might have used his own finger as a model and simply placed the doctors' prints on it. Alternatively, as with The Old Gummi Bear Trick, the item bearing the fingerprints needn't look much like a finger at all.

Without biometrics (and with a more careful set of individuals), it might have been very difficult to prove that the doctors involved weren't just victims of identity theft by a corrupt official. With the evidence on hand (!) it should be a simple matter to determine if the fake fingers match those of the ghost doctors.

A larger question is whether this story argues for or against the adoption of biometric systems for time-and-attendance. Nobody should claim that biometrics or any other security or ID management measure is perfect and infallible. Nothing is infallible. In this case, however, it appears that having a biometric rather than a paper-based time-and-attendance system increased the costs and complexity of committing the fraud. It made executing its daily function (clocking in) more difficult to do without being noticed. And (at least in this case) it forced those complicit in the scheme to create pretty significant evidence of their involvement.

As a manager or law enforcement official, which case would you rather prosecute: one with rubber fingers or one with only a paper trail?

Note: This post has undergone a few revisions for the purposes of updating the post, correcting typographical or grammatical errors and to add clarity.