Hospitals using fingerprint scanners to reduce insurance-card fraud.
Healthcare organizations are turning to a high-tech means to combat fraud: fingerprint biometrics that capture the patient’s fingerprint to prove identity.
Catholic Health Systems in Buffalo, N.Y., and the Advanced Ambulatory Surgical Center in Chicago have patients place a finger on a biometrics scanner during the front-desk registration process. The fingerprint image is captured electronically and made part of the patient’s permanent record in a database that is accessible over an internal LAN. If another individual at a different time attempts to use the same health-insurance card, the transaction is stopped.
While statistics about the extent of this crime are hard to come by, FBI supervisory special agent Joe Parris says the FBI is aware of the problem, although the crime is usually prosecuted at the local law-enforcement level. Sharing a health-insurance card is “identity theft with permission,” Parris says.
At Catholic Health Systems, the main impetus to electronically fingerprint patients was to eliminate the insurance-card fraud.
“There’s no picture on an insurance card, and sometimes it can get passed around,” says Jeffrey Baughan, vice president of IT at the healthcare provider, which operates four regional hospitals. About six months ago, the healthcare organization’s Sisters of Charity hospital began using the Ultra-Scan fingerprint scanner in the admissions process to establish the patient’s identity. The electronic fingerprint image, which is stored in a Siemens health-information management system used at Sisters of Charity, has been effective in combatting insurance fraud. Baughan says he’d like to expand use of it to have nurses and other staff submit to a fingerprint scan before accessing a narcotics cabinet, for example.
The Ultra-Scan fingerprint scanner – which works differently than optical fingerprint readers because it uses an ultrasound process to capture a fingerprint image – has worked so well that Catholic Health Systems plans to roll it out to its other area hospitals in the next few months. The Ultra-Scan scanner can accurately read fingerprints smudged by dirt, grease or newsprint. It also can capture the prints of people whose prints are often hard to capture – very young children, the elderly and some ethnic groups such as Asian women.
According to Ultra-Scan founder Dr. John Schneider, who invented the ultrasonic fingerprint-imaging process, Asian females tend to have very fine ridges on their fingers. This can present a problem for optical scanners. However, Ultra-Scan equipment, which uses sound rather than light, is more sensitive. “And it works no matter what the contamination on the finger is,” Schneider says.
One optical fingerprint scanner maker, AuthenTec, acknowledges that the delicacy of Asian women’s fingerprints can be hard to reliably capture but the company says it has overcome the problems and its technology is used in cell phones in the Asian market, although not in hospitals for patient identification. However, St. Vincent Hospital in Indianapolis does use AuthenTec fingerprint scanners for a single sign-on mechanism developed by Computer Associates so that hospital employees can access the hospital’s internal network.
The Advanced Ambulatory Surgical Center, staffed with about 100 doctors, also says its primary motivation for using Ultra-Scan biometrics was preventing fraudulent use of health-insurance cards.
“The patients come in to register for surgery, and we fingerprint them,” says Dr. Severko Hrywnak, owner and CEO of the surgical center, which began using Ultra-Scan fingerprint readers last spring. Hrywnak says, for example, the center has discovered patients switching insurance cards with others. Most commonly, it’s a matter of insurance cards getting passed around among family members.
Fingerprint biometrics also comes in handy before the hospitalized patient undergoes treatment. A quick check of the patient’s fingerprint via biometrics scan makes it clear to nurses and doctors that there’s been no misidentification of the patient before surgery or other procedure.
The surgical center also uses the fingerprint scanner for this purpose. “It’s the wave of the future in healthcare,” Hrywnak says. Healthcare organizations using the biometrics say patients typically don’t balk at the process of putting a finger into the scanner.
