Patient Eye Scan Designed to Cut Misidentification Costs, Fraud

With Medicare insurance fraud and medical identity theft on the rise, the health care industry may be poised to adopt iris-control access technology that’s commonly used in airport and immigration security. Health care debt collectors also would be indirect beneficiaries.

Chantilly, Va.-based Eye Controls launched in February a proven iris identification system for public and employee identification and access control. Evan Smith, the company’s chief executive, told insideARM.com that a major public clinic in New York is the beta test site for it product called SafeMatch.

“They’ve seen it work and plan to use it everyplace they do something with the patient to make sure they’ve got the right patient, treatment and medication,” Smith said. He added that a number of major hospital systems are looking into using the system.

Smith said the technology can be used during admissions to process patients and access medical histories and medications, thus eliminating much of the costs associated with misidentification. There have also been occasional deaths from patient misidentification. SafeMatch can be used to curb Medicare fraud (“South Florida Home to 20% of Nation’s Medicare Fraud,” June 6), and bad debt that results from identification theft.

“It’s capable of identifying a person without you having any other information about them, out of a database of millions of people,” Smith said of the system that’s designed to work with any health care software and database.

SafeMatch uses a handheld devise to scan the iris and assign a numeric code to the patient. If used every time a patient is admitted, tested or treated for an ailment, it significantly eliminates record contamination, which may result in misdiagnosis and inappropriate billing to people with shared names or other characteristics.

“If you have better record keeping, matching patients to records and definite identification of patients, then that has to improve collections rates,” Smith said.

Robert Siciliano, an identity theft security consultant, said biometric technology such as iris identification is among the better solutions for properly identifying patients and securing records. But the technology should be used everywhere medical records can be accessed.

“That will cut or eliminate both financial and medical identification theft,” Siciliano said.