Carolinas HealthCare System has reduced its duplicate medical records error rate from 2.9 percent  to 0.01 percent using ID and authentication technology. That improvement, in turn, has helped bolster the health system’s patient safety initiatives, which CIO Craig Richardville called the ultimate return on investment for the technology.

“We were looking at it to uniquely identify patients, especially in an electronic health records environment, where problems with duplication of medical records, error rates, incorrectly combining records, and finding a perfect patient match get accentuated,” Richardville said. “In a manual world, you can pull information out and combine records fairly easily. In an electronic world, incorrect data potentially can get integrated.”

Additionally, Carolinas uses clinical decision support technology along with its EHRs, and if patient information getting pumped into the decision support system is incorrect, that can lead to improper guidance for providers, Richardville said.

So Carolinas went with Imprivata’s palm-vein biometrics to complement its enterprise master patient index. When being admitted into any facility, a patient age 13 or older places his or her hand atop the palm-vein scanner, which on the first scan identifies the unique vein pattern underneath the skin and assigns that pattern an algorithm and unique identification number within the enterprise master patient index. After that, no matter the Carolinas location that patient enters, the palm scan will link registrars and caregivers to that patient’s proper and complete records.

[Also: Carolinas Craig Richardville named CIO of the Year by CHIME, HIMSS.]

Richardville said that 97 percent of patients have accepted the technology and agreed to palm-vein scans.

“We still have 3 percent or so who do not want to use it, which may be over privacy concerns, a religious concern having to do with the palm, or a lack of understanding of this one additional thing we’re looking to capture from them,” he explained.

Richardville said Carolinas did consider other biometrics technologies.

“We looked at iris recognition, but it was more expensive and to some patients it felt intrusive to have something looking into your eye, even though it’s just a camera taking a picture,” Richardville said. “We looked at fingerprint, which was less expensive, but there were many false positives. That error rate was too high, and we thought we were hitting a better rate even with manual than with fingerprint, so it did not gain us a significant advantage. When we did our pilots, people felt most comfortable with palm-vein scans.”

In addition to reducing the duplicate medical record error rate, the biometrics technology has helped identify unconscious trauma patients in emergency rooms and has helped the health system avoid some cases of insurance fraud, Richardville added.

Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT