University Health Care System has implemented RightPatient; CA Technologies released enhancements to its privileged access management portfolio; GlobalPlatform published updates to its Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) Initial Configuration v1.1 and Test Suite v2.0; TeleSign announced it has appointed Aled Miles as CEO.

It’s been almost a decade since the Carolinas HealthCare System deployed a patient-matching biometric program that uses palm vein scanning and the health care provider has experienced great success with the modality. The health care provider reports a 70% reduction in check-in time, and 99.9% of its patients are correctly matched to their electronic health records.

The use of smart cards for patient ID would curb almost a quarter of Medicare fraud cases, according to a report from the GAO. The agency reviewed 739 health care fraud cases that were resolved in 2010 to try and find out how these schemes were conducted and if smart cards would prevent the fraud.

MorphoTrust’s NSTIC pilot looked at creating an electronic ID for accessing online services that would offer the same level of security, privacy protection and identity authentication as in-person transactions. The piot was with the North Carolina Department of Transportation and Health and Human Services.

The RightPatient biometric safety and patient data integrity system has been implemented at Bethesda Hospital East and Bethesda Hospital West.

Bills submitted in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate proposes a smart card pilot program for Medicaid recipients. If passed through Congress and signed into law the bill would require the Department of Health and Human Services to initiate a smart card pilot for Medicaid recipients.

Hospitals and health care organizations across the country are starting to rollout biometric technology to identify patients, reduce identity theft problems and solve the problem of duplicate medical records.

Medicare doles out more than $600 billion a year to health care organizations. Specific fraud statistics range but estimates suggest $20 billion is going toward fraudulent claims. The Medicare ID card is paper, has the owner’s Social Security number printed on it and bears no real security features. The GAO examined how different card technology could be used to prevent some of this fraud.

Smart cards and other types of “subscriber identity tokens” can be an effective tool to reduce medical identity theft, improve privacy, combat fraud by both claim submitters and patients and enable patient matching in health care provider systems.

Health care providers are starting to see the benefit of using biometrics for patient identification. These benefits include: less fraud, fewer duplicate records, shorter wait times. M2SYS Technology’s Michael Trader and Novant Health’s Melanie Wilson chat with Regarding ID’s Gina Jordan about biometrics in health care.