9 minute read
Patient identity management and the future of consumer-driven healthcare
Patient identity management and the future of consumerdriven healthcare
Healthcare must embrace ways to collect, verify, and share digital patient identities to deliver a better patient experience, says Lyniate’s Royston Adamson-Green, Director, Channel Sales UK, EMEA & APAC
Patients’ access to their health records has, historically, not been a straightforward process. And even with that access, chances are high that the data was out of date or incomplete. The merging of advanced digital technologies and our daily routines has driven an expectation that the patient record should be accessible by the patient at the exact time it is needed and, more importantly, independent of the requirement for requesting data from their healthcare provider. Today’s consumers demand convenience. Unfortunately, challenges associated with managing the unique identities of patients – and the associated patient data – remains a fundamental challenge to delivering this convenience.
Healthcare’s heavy reliance on paper notes, signatures, and paperwork to prove identity can cause significant frustrations for patients and providers, including incorrect patient matching, medical errors, repeated services, and poor communication. The rise in visitation to urgent care clinics over traditional primary care pathways continues to grow, signalling consumers want access to care on their terms: this includes walk-in appointments, neighboring locations, and 24-hour availability. Today, patients are increasingly finding that going to their neighbourhood urgent care clinic or pharmacy to receive tests and vaccinations is far more convenient for their busy lifestyles.
Royston Adamson-Green Director, Channel Sales UK, EMEA & APAC Lyniate
experience while retaining safety, security, and compliance, healthcare must embrace ways to collect, verify, and share digital patient identities.
One possible solution is to leverage smartphones to organise and consolidate digital IDs into a single location. Consumers could then possess a onestop tool that gives them increased ownership of their own care, health data and online identity, without having to administer physical documents. For this to be possible, it will be important that such a solution allows providers to meet emerging standards of patient data access and consent.
Furthermore, having a digital “wallet” that retains multiple forms of identification in one convenient place should bypass the need for consumers to remember multiple usernames and passwords. Helping consumers control, manage and consolidate their online identities (or accounts) in one place is not a new concept; however, it has not advanced enough for there to be mass adoption across industries. Historically, aspects of healthcare have been slow to adopt new technologies and will likely be the last sector across industries to follow suit.
But what if healthcare could lead the pack for once?
And with more convenient access to their medical treatment options, consumers are now becoming more aware, involved, and educated about their health. Importantly, they can also become active participants in managing their health data and ensuring the accuracy of their medical histories.
However, for the industry to truly empower consumers to oversee their health data, it will have to take advantage of the mobile revolution and create a seamless, password-less experience. And that must start with a digital identity exchange network that enables providers to meet the demands of today’s tech-savvy consumers by reducing the redundant and paper-based interactions that slow down care delivery. Everything from patient registration to health assessments can and should be automated using digital credentials for fast, contact-less check-ins and 100 per cent patient identification accuracy. From a consumer perspective, patients expect to access and share their digital health records using their smartphones.
Today, consumers can shop, pay bills, stream music, or watch a movie without having to enter in their information every time they open an app. At the same time, they continually receive a ra of forms to fill out when they visit their doctor or a hospital. To deliver a better patient
The COVID effect
A er two years of masks, plexiglass partitions, cancelled events, and constant reminders to stay six feet apart, most people have had their fill of social distancing. In so many ways, the
urgent need to remain physically separate has taken a toll on our relationships with one another, straining the bonds that make families, friendships, and businesses function.
But even in a time of unprecedented challenges, there is a silver lining: the sudden pressure to go contactless has forced us to get creative about conducting daily tasks at a distance – and we are discovering that some things might be better that way. From kerbside retail and tap-to-pay transactions to meetings that really could be virtual, we have quickly embraced technology-driven strategies to keep people safe while improving e iciencies.
Healthcare has had similar lessons to learn. The use of telehealth, texting, and other remote interactions has now ballooned, and early results indicate that both patients and providers are highly satisfied with remote care. The idea of creating a digital-first healthcare environment is nothing new, but the trialby-fire of COVID-19 pushed the industry to expedite major tech projects.
The undeniable convenience of these new strategies begs the question: why go back to certain complicated, timeconsuming, high-risk activities when there is an easier way?
To continue developing better experiences while retaining high standards of safety, e ectiveness, and compliance, we will need to ensure the building blocks of digital healthcare are firmly in place. We must start by embracing innovative ways to generate, verify, manage, and share trustworthy digital patient identities. By creating reliable “patient passports,” healthcare organisations can be sure that the right person is getting the right services in the most e icient manner – whether that person is physically standing in front of a check-in desk or not.
Royston Adamson-Green Director, Channel Sales UK, EMEA & APAC Lyniate
What could a digital patient “passport” do?
Even though healthcare providers have been using digital patient records for many years, it’s still incredibly di icult to avoid duplicated, incomplete, or incorrect patient profiles. An error rate of 8 to 10 percent is commonly cited across the industry, although some organisations experience significantly more mistakes due to ine ective patient matching algorithms, fragmented data, and siloed health IT systems.
COVID-19 exacerbated these issues as millions of citizens fell ill with the virus and required testing. To care for patients correctly, providers needed access to complete and up-to-date records that include pre-existing conditions and other risks that may a ect treatment protocols.
Multi-step vaccinations needed to reach more communities, with many vaccinations delivered by di ering state entities outside the traditional primary care setting. The need to keep track of an individual’s healthcare interactions became even greater.
With clean, accurate, and verified information collected into a single packet – and then shared across disparate systems in a standardised manner – healthcare providers could deliver an entirely new generation of safe, impactful services.
And by providing patients with a secure digital wallet, accessible via their phone, we would empower patients to not only take a more active role in their own care but help ensure the accuracy of their healthcare information. For example, fully vaccinated patients could use their passports to easily ‘unlock’ certain experiences, such as an in-person visit with their physician, while reducing concerns about exposure for the patient and the sta .
Patients could use a passport app to send verified clinical questionnaires and insurance information to a new specialist before their appointment to speed up registration, reduce in-person contact time, and avoid duplicated or incorrectly merged records. Perhaps someday soon, with appropriate privacy and security in place, we could even use smartphone location data in conjunction with the digital passport to automate check-in from the parking lot, skipping the waiting room all together, and be called in when the exam room is free. This is the near future of healthcare, but achieving these goals depends on widespread adoption of trusted digital identity technologies.
How can digital passports become a reality?
Healthcare organisations with enterprise master patient index (EMPI) tools in place already enjoy significantly fewer patient identity errors and higher patient matching rates.
EMPIs provide a consistent platform to integrate multiple data sources into a single record of an individual’s journey through the care continuum. With a unique identifier and sophisticated record location and matching algorithms, organisations can be confident that newly generated data is being associated with the correct file.
The use of the EMPI as an accurate patient directory is a critical tool in the creation of the patient passport. And to further transcend barriers between points of care delivery, we need a portable, privacy-preserving way of dealing with
patient identity beyond the boundaries of individual healthcare organisations.
That’s where the blockchain comes in. Much more than just the backbone of cryptocurrency, blockchain technology can be used as a public ledger to store and manage the life cycle of decentralised identifiers (DID). These globally unique DIDs are used as the anchor points for verifiable health credentials, such as insurance cards, test results, and vaccination records. Using this concept, a trust network between issuers, holders, and verifiers of credentials can be established. With these features, blockchain could be a game-changer for identity management and verification at key stages where patient data errors o en occur—during enrolment and at registration, all while maintaining strict patient privacy.
In addition, coupling a decentralised identifier with detailed consent policies allows patients to share or restrict access to specific data when necessary, keeping individuals in charge of who sees what data at what time. In the healthcare setting, this decentralised approach to identity management has the potential to improve privacy and strengthen the ability to verify patient identities across participating members of the care continuum.
The patient fit
By placing patients in control of their identity and consent preferences, healthcare organisations could enhance patient engagement and o er attractive virtual experiences while simultaneously leapfrogging many of the challenges posed by patient identity verification.
Landmark overhauls in healthcare delivery are driving the need to introduce new innovations in patient identification to achieve 100 per cent matching accuracy. As organisations pivot to value-based care and continue to grapple with COVID-19, the need for an accurate and authenticated view of every patient becomes increasingly critical to avoid redundant or unnecessary procedures, billing inaccuracies, administrative burdens, denied claims, and lost revenue.
The COVID-19 pandemic will leave more than a few lasting lessons, including the idea that some virtual experiences are better than their in-person counterparts.
With healthcare organisations continually under pressure to improve quality, engage patients, and reduce burdens on providers, the digital patient passport could be just what we’re looking for to move forward in the right direction.
At Lyniate, we have been working on such a mission, investing in solutions to empower the healthcare industry to lead when it comes to enabling consumers to control and manage their own data. We encourage you to reach out to us to discuss your thoughts on advancing patient identity management towards a more consumerdriven healthcare landscape.
Contact Information
royston.adamsongreen@lyniate.com
