Lexington, MA-based healthcare IT security company Imprivata, has launched Imprivata PatientSecure, a positive patient identification solution that uses palm vein biometrics to create a one-to-one link between patients and their correct medical record in their provider’s EHR system. Patient mis-identification is a growing national problem—on average 7 to 10% of patients are misidentified when their medical records are accessed. In addition, medical identity theft impacted more than 2 million Americans in 2014 and is growing 22 percent per year. In April, Imprivata acquired HT Systems of Tampa, Fla. and its PatientSecure positive patient identification solution, which has identified more than 22 million patients across more than 350 hospitals and thousands of affiliated clinics.
Imprivata PatientSecure addresses the increasing need to accurately identify patients by matching individuals and their digital health record with a simple scan of hand to capture the unique palm vein pattern of a patient. The solution directly integrates with leading healthcare information systems and helps improve patient safety and satisfaction, eliminate duplicate medical records and overlays, drive revenue cycle efficiency, and safeguard against identity theft and insurance fraud. By leveraging its sales, marketing and engineering expertise, Imprivata is accelerating investment to expand the development and adoption of the Imprivata PatientSecure solution globally as providers look to address critical patient identification issues.
“Since deploying our palm vein biometric identification platform, we have significantly reduced registration errors and lowered our duplicate medical record rate to 0.11 percent of our patient census, which is 80 times better than the national average. Along with garnering positive feedback and compliance from patients using the solution we have also experienced improvement in our front-end patient registration process, which has enhanced our overall revenue cycle management operation,” said Craig Richardville, Chief Information Officer of Carolinas Healthcare System, one of the nation’s leading healthcare organizations with more than 900 care locations throughout North Carolina and South Carolina.
Imprivata PatientSecure is designed to make the patient enrollment process, check-in, and registration process fast and easy, while providing patients with security and protection of their privacy. The solution’s palm vein scanner is not intrusive to patients, making it an ideal form of identification at any point in the care process. When deployed with a self-service kiosk solution, Imprivata PatientSecure further reduces wait times and helps improve patient satisfaction measures such as HCAHPS scores that impact hospital’s Meaningful Use targets.
