Patient Identification

[Former Member]

Hi all,

I was wondering if it was possible to integrate something like the human fingerprint into the Healthcare solution to use it as a part of the patient's key. This way we could avoid registering the same patient twice with all the consequences that this could cause. Or are there any mecanisms to differentiate new patients?

Thanks in advance,

Best Regards,

Ezequiel

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

hi ezequiel,

in theory it would be possible to use bio identification mechanisms in patient identification (using an append and adopting the 'patient object' accordingly).

in practice, during admission you are forced to search before creating a new patient. if you find out later that you nevertheless registered one patient twice you have an opportunity to de-duplicate patients, i.e. perform a consolidation.

moreover, here in europe using bioidentification is regarded to be a very sensitive topic and such a solution would experience a lot of enmity. here the trend is to use patient identification cards (healthcare smartcards) issued by insurance companies or alike.

regards, anton

[Former Member]

Hi Anton,

You are right that one of the cons of using such a scheme would be to make a complete search to ensure that the patient has not been registered before. But the main advantage would be to avoid duplicates, because biometric mecanisms (fingerprints for example) provide unique IDs. This could be seen as an advantage because you wouldn't have to perform consolidations (which could be much more time and resource consuming) to look for duplicate entries.

But, again, it is true that biometric mecanisms for pacient identification are a very sensitive topic all over the world. A few years ago, I took part of a project to create a small pilot electronic health record system (only ambulatory care) for a hospital here in Argentina. We proposed to use fingerprints as pacients IDs but there was so much resistance from doctors that we had to drop it.

This subject brings up another question: does SAP's Healthcare Solution provides consolidation mecanisms?

Thank you very much for taking the time to reply.

Best Regards,

Ezequiel

[Former Member]

Ezequiel,

of course SAP for Hralthcare supports patient consolidation.

Here's the link to <a href="http://help.sap.com/saphelp_erp2005/helpdata/en/08/ac7ad8d46711d189f20000e829fbbd/content.htm">patient merge</a> in the official documetation.

regards, anton

[Former Member]

Hi all,

Patient identification is a very important issue at every IS.-H large project, Patient Merging is not the final solution because it only works when you have created a new patient because you haven't found the patient created before in your searchs, in this case you are deactivating the new patient and merging with the old existing one, but imagine that you are searching using Name and Last Name and you find one patient that matchs but is not the real one (very common on large institutions) and you create a new case, in this situation you will need later to transfer a case from one patient to a different one, this is not supported by standard.

In Spain we always use Special healthcare cards to identify patients on large institutions, but this method does not work on situations of emergencies, because the patient could arrive without identification and not conscious, in this common cases Fingerprint techniques would be a good solution.

Regards,

[Former Member]

Hi Jesus,

to cover your emergency scenario the way you propose would require to apply bioidentification to the regular patients as well, otherwise you still wouldn't know if the already existing patient is the one you just identified by his fingerprint.

As I said before, I can't imagine (and don't want to as a concerned citizen) that the public accepts bioidentification as a broadly established means anytime soon.

Regarding your mentioning of 'patient splitting' I think that is a very delicate operation. Given the situation that you described occured. It wouldn't be that serious an issue to 'split' administrational data like a blank case or visit data. But what about any type of medical content? How would you want to distinguish in the given situation if a finding, medication, diagnosis, ... refers to one or the other 'personality'?.

I think if your processes provoke such situations too often you might easily cause some harm. So, I would do everything to avoid this situation and therefore, in cases where the emergency patient cannot be identified to a reasonable probability, define the process just to create a new patient and merge it later with an existing one. Even when you're in the lucky situation to a priori have the whole population of your region/country/... registered as patients due to legal regulations.

my 2 cents,

anton

sidenote: the unconscious, unidentifiable emergency patient could have his fingers injured and this could call for a combination of fingerprint and iris scan ...

[Former Member]

Hi Anton,

Yes, I agree bioidentification is not the answer but under certain circumstances could help, due the Universal coverage system maintained in Spain Public health Services mantain a Database with all the personal data of all the citizens in Spain, actually Institutions can access it online using patient card, fingerprint in this case is not so different, of course that in some cases fingerprints can be damaged.

And about case splitting is not very different of case merging in medical terms speaking, in both cases, you don't have the right patient information when you are making a prescription taking care about alergies, ...; from a technical point of view, patient merging and patient splitting could have similar developements.

Regards,

[Former Member]

Hi Ezequiel

There is an third party application which is SYS. With this applications you can add securty and dada ecryption with fingerprint. You can find some details about this applications on: <a href="http://www.secureyoursap.com">www.secureyoursap.com</a>