Washington, DC-focused Healthcare Provider to Deploy Biometric Patient Recognition

An Arlington-based healthcare services provider is embracing biometric patient identification in a big way. VHC Health, which serves the Washington, DC metropolitan area, has announced that it will use facial recognition at all of its locations in order to confirm patient identity.

The biometric system will connect with VHC’s electronic health record database as well as its administrative systems, allowing patients to be reliably and efficiently identified from check-in to departure. In a statement announcing the plans to implement the biometric system, VHC noted that patient misidentification and fraud “have become increasingly rampant issues,” adding that this leads to serious liabilities for healthcare providers.

Biometric technologies can effectively address these issues by matching patients’ biometrics directly to their health records. This can also help to eliminate duplicate records, another perennial issue in the healthcare sector.

The biometric system will be provided by CERTIFY Health, a digital patient intake solutions specialist founded in 2012. The company notably also delivered a biometric patient identification system, also based on facial recognition, for Pennsylvania’s Geisinger health network last year.

In VHC’s case, CERTIFY Health’s “Positive Patient Identification” (or “PPID”) solution won’t be implemented all at once. A biometric patient check-in system will be piloted at VHC’s radiology and cardiology department starting this month, with the healthcare services provider hoping to fully implement CERTIFY Health’s PPID solution by the end of this year.

Commenting in a statement, CERTIFY Health CEO Marc Potash lauded VHC for its commitment to innovation in the provision of healthcare services. “Our innovative PPID technology will safeguard VHC patient information and increase speed and efficiency during the check-in process,” he asserted.

Market analysts have predicted that biometric technologies will play an increasingly important role in the healthcare sector. Around the time of CERTIFY Health’s Geisinger deployment, Grand View Research issued a report forecasting that the Healthcare Automatic Identification and Data Capture market would reach a value of $62 billion by 2028; and earlier this year, Transparency Market Research predicted that the healthcare biometrics market will reach a value of $74.08 billion by that date.

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June 4, 2022 – by Alex Perala