BIOMETRIC AUTHENTICATION – A CURE FOR THE COMMON PASSWORD

By Debra Miller - Digital Marketing Communications Manager, HID

The Root Cause of Most Healthcare Security Breaches

The human element, such as phishing, stolen credentials, and human error, causes 82% of data breaches. It is little wonder that these conditions pose critical security and financial risks to the healthcare industry.

One of the obvious reasons for security breaches is that healthcare workers log in to multiple computer systems dozens of times per shift. Consequently, healthcare workers must remember eight to 20 passwords to access patient-care applications.

Because they work under extreme time constraints and need to remember complicated, ever-changing passwords, some healthcare workers engage in risky password behaviours. For example, 51% of people reuse work passwords in their personal lives. Unfortunately, 44% of people know the risks of reusing passwords but do it anyway; and 69% of employees admit to sharing passwords with colleagues at work. These conditions lead to compromised, weak, and reused passwords, causing 81% of data breaches.

Moreover, for the past 12 years, healthcare, one of the more highly regulated industries, has suffered the highest average cost due to system breaches.

How Biometric Authentication Provides a Cure for the Common Password

Preventing those breaches is critical to protecting patient privacy and confidentiality. This makes biometric authentication a critical element of a healthcare organization's identity assurance strategy.

Biometric authentication delivers the highest level of identity assurance. While passwords are easy to forget, and wristbands and ID cards can be misplaced or stolen, biometric markers are unique to each individual and cannot be lost or forgotten. Biometric technology relies on something we always have with us: our fingerprints or faces.

Here's how biometric authentication works. It compares two sets of data, the first is present by the device owner, and the second belongs to the device visitor. If the two data are nearly identical, the device knows that "visitor" and "owner" are one and the same and gives access to the visitor.

Biometric authentication provides a cure for the common password by providing healthcare organizations with the following benefits:

• Irrefutable proof of presence for regulatory and legal compliance. Biometric authentication provides instant insights on who accessed which systems and resources and accurately identifies patients across multiple systems and facilities.

• Fast and easy patient identity assurance. Biometric matching takes a fraction of a second. Accelerated access to patient data enables clinicians to be more productive and provide better care throughout the patient’s journey.

• Minimized human intervention for improved data accuracy. Biometric identification is automated, frictionless, and sterile. It ensures data accuracy even when people wear surgical masks, and it eliminates duplicate medical records. Fingerprint scanners have accuracy rates above 99.5%. Best-in-class facial recognition systems deliver an error rate of just 0.08%.

• Mitigated risks of patient misidentification. Patient misidentification costs the healthcare system billions of dollars each year. And more important, it can lead to tragic medical errors that cause temporary or permanent patient harm.

• Reduced identity fraud. Nearly 43,000 cases of medical identity theft were reported to the Federal Trade Commission in 2021. By extending security to systems that contain personal and sensitive data, biometrics increases the privacy of those individuals and reduces the risk of identity theft.