Hospital Patient Facial Recognition

(Hospitalized wildebeest facial recognition image from Google Gemini)

It’s no secret that I detest the practice of identifying a patient by their name and birthdate. A fraudster can easily acquire this knowledge and impersonate a patient.

The people that I hang around with promote biometrics as a better solution to authentication of a hospital patient whose identity was previously verified. Of course, this crowd promotes biometrics as the solution to EVERYTHING. My former Motorola coworker Edward Chen has established a company called Biometrics4ALL.

But the need to identify patients is real. Are you about to remove Jane’s appendix? You’d better make sure that’s Jane on the operating table. And yes, that mistake has happened. (The hospital was very sorry.)

Of the various biometric modalities, face seems the most promising for the health use case, particularly for hospital patients.

• Fingerprints require you or a medical professional to move your finger(s) to a contact or contactless reader. 
• Hand geometry is even more difficult.
• For iris or retinal scans, your eyes have to be open.
• For voice, you have to be awake. And coherent—I’m not sure if a person can be identified by a moan of pain.
• DNA takes at least 90 minutes.
• Gait? Um…no.

Unlike the other modalities, the patient doesn’t have to do anything for facial recognition. Even if asleep or sedated, a medical professional can capture an image of a patient’s face. There are some accuracy considerations; I don’t know how well the algorithms work with closed eyes or a wide open mouth. But it looks promising.

Imprivata agrees that facial recognition is a valuable patient identification method.

“By capturing and analyzing unique facial characteristics such as the distance between the eyes and the shape of the nose, this technology can generate a unique identifier for each patient. This identifier is then linked to the patient’s electronic health record (EHR), ensuring that medical staff access the correct records. This method significantly reduces the risk of misidentification and the occurrence of duplicate records, thereby enhancing patient safety.”

However, I can think of one instance in which patient facial recognition would be challenging.

Burn victims.

If the patient were enrolled before the injury, the combination of disfigurement and bandaging would limit the ability to compare the current face to the previously enrolled one.

But this can be overcome. After all, we figured out how to recognize the faces of people wearing masks.