Biometrics in Healthcare Patient Identification

Healthcare is a service industry which largely depends on its quality for success. Quality of medical services depends on various important points and one of them is to provide right medical care to the right patient. That's why patient identification has become a top priority within the healthcare industry today. Biometric is a fine way of identifying patients above all the traditional patient identification systems.

Think about a hospital which has no proper positive patient identification system or hospital management system. It's not only time consuming for them to identify the patients manually every time before providing medical care, but it can become a major threat if somehow they fail to identify the right patient. In an emergency situation, where timely decision making can become the factor between life and death, a doctor or hospital authorities will have to identify the patients manually for looking up the patients past medical history into the EHR/EMR system.

Some hospitals use bar code readable wristbands to identify patients with their patient management system. That's another inefficient way of increasing the hassle and cost for the hospital authorities for positive patient identification. For some reason the patient losses the wristband or it gets exchanged it can cause serious issues. As for the hospitals another administrative hassles to take care of beside their core service.

Another concerning issue is on the rise recently, "Medical Identity Theft". As the quality & technology improvement of medical services are taking place, the cost is also increasing. That's why the rate of patient id theft is also on the rise. So today a patient medical record needs more privacy and it should be available only to him whenever he needs it.

Now let's take a look at the biometric patient identification system. Biometric is something which a always with the patient. Even if the patient is unconscious hospitals have access to it. So there no need to depend on manual systems like ID cards, wrist band & so on. Biometric systems like RightPatient by M2SYS Technology can be integrated quite easily with the existing EHR/EMR system so that only the medical authorities & patients can have direct access to personal medical records. Unlike wrist bands biometric can never be lost or replaced so the chances of accidents and frauds can be minimized up to a great deal.

A biometric System for patient identification seems to be the timeliest choice at this moment for healthcare industry. It can help the hospital authorities to concentrate on their core service offering which is providing healthcare service, rather than keeping themselves occupied with unnecessary administrative hassle's.