Floyd Memorial installs fingerprint scanners
While this is the “glazed over” story about why our local hospital has implemented this digital finger print reader attached to their medical record system. This week I was in the hospital for some out pt lab tests and got to talking to the lab tech about this system. It would seem that the larger motivation for the hospital to implement this system… is their experience of multiple people showing up requesting services … many using the same set of medical insurance cards/coverage. Think insurance fraud. In case you haven’t heard.. all sorts of database hacks have happened in large hospital systems, health insurance companies, Federal Office of Personnel Management and how many others that have yet to be uncovered happening or admitted that it has happened.
Maybe this data hacks can help explain:
http://www.nola.com/crime/baton-rouge/index.ssf/2015/05/counterfeit_prescription_drug.html
should we be using such a system with the various state PMP’s or if ignoring such a system to prevent diversion… have a different meaning ?
Floyd Memorial Hospital hopes a tiny, glowing blue box could help improve patient care and prevent medical identity theft.
The box is part of the hospital’s new partnership with technology company CrossChx, which uses unique points of patients’ fingerprints to generate a code linking them to their medical information.
“I think it’s more secure,” said Tammy Utz, whose fingerprint flashed on a computer monitor recently when she registered for pre-operative testing. She’s never worried much about her own medical identity being stolen, but knows “there’s been a lot of identity theft issues.”
In 2013, just over 1.8 million American adults were victims of medical identity theft — when a fraudster uses someone else’s personal information to access medical benefits — at a total estimated out-of-pocket cost of more than $12 billion in related expenses, according to a report from the Ponemon Institute.
“People don’t realize (medical identity theft) is prevalent,” hospital spokeswoman Angie Rose said. “We’re trying to prevent that from happening.”
Floyd Memorial also hopes the CrossChx system will cut down on its approximately 100 monthly duplicate patient records, usually created when a patient registers under a middle name or nickname — say “Mike” instead of “Michael.”
With the associated administrative and other expenses estimated at $50 per pair, according to a 2012 American Medical Informatics Association article, “Duplicate Patient Records – Implication for Missed Laboratory Results,” duplicate records can be costly for hospitals.
But they could also be costly for patients.
If Michael’s record shows he has an allergy but Mike’s doesn’t, an unaware healthcare provider could give him a dangerous medication, Manager of Patient Access Services Laurie Scarff said. “If we don’t put it together that that’s the same person, we might not be aware of that allergy.”
Floyd Memorial uses patients’ social security numbers and date of birth to find and combine duplicate records at registration, Scarff said. But CrossChx will help ensure they’re not created in the first place, since “your finger is your finger” — regardless of the name used.
The first time they check in, patients are asked to scan their right index finger five times so the system can lock in their assigned code. On later visits, they can register with one scan. The fingerprints themselves are not stored, Rose said.
Floyd Memorial “encourages, but doesn’t require” patients to use the system, Scarff said. She said that in the first week, more than 98 percent of patients asked agreed to do so.
Reporter Baylee Pulliam can be reached at (812) 298-5601 or on Twitter at @BayleePulliam.
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