Bio-Me

Bio-Me will be a primarily cloud based platform that allow healthcare providers access to medical records tied to their patients' biometrics. Medical mix-ups and mistakes continue to be a leading cause of death for Americans, including simple patient mix-ups. By linking patients' medical records to their biometrics, providers can immediately access records once a patient has given consent and provide their biometric attributes. Patients will be able to provide their records to any hospital, primary care, or other healthcare provider with access to Bio-Me and guarantee their information is linked with their verified identity. In addition to common modalities such as facial recognition and fingerprints, Bio-Me will also support touchless fingerprint capture and provide a touchless experience when necessary. Globally, Bio-Me can provide patients around the world with verified medical records, bolster nationalized healthcare systems, or provide touchless information exchange during another pandemic or flu season.

A 2016 study John's Hopkins, Medical error - the third leading cause of death in the US, found that over an 8 year period more than 250,000 Americans died annually from medical mistakes. More specifically, a 2008 study by the RAND corporation, Identity Crisis ...Health Care System, found that healthcare providers mismatched patients and records an average of 8& of the time, costing providers an estimated $8 billion annually. Nationally, this issue is exacerbated in low income communities where providers struggle to meet all the needs of their patients. While data is more sparse, globally, such an issue is impossible to be unique to the US. 

The Covid pandemic has also shown how overwhelmed healthcare providers can be. Hospitals were overflowing and healthcare professionals split between many patients, some of whom were covered in respiratory equipment or masks. With communication stifled, time of the essence, identities masked, healthcare professionals need an efficient and trustworthy method to correctly identify their patients. In addition, modalities such as facial recognition and touchless fingerprint capture can be used for a touchless experience in sterile enviroments.

Bio-Me will link patients' medical records to their biometric attributes, facial scans and touchless fingerprints. All records and biometric attributes will all be stored in a cloud environment to be access by medical providers including primary care provider, urgent care clinics, and hospitals. Bio-ME will provide healthcare providers with a camera/scanner for capturing facial scans and touchless fingerprints. 

Once a patient arrives at a healthcare provider with access to Bio-Me, they will be prompted for consent to capture their biometrics. Patients with existing profiles in Bio-ME will have their attribute capture and Bio-Me will perform a 1:1 match with the attribute on file and provide a local copy of the medical records for the healthcare provider. For new patients, Bio-Me will be able to intake medical records and enroll patients from primary care providers using the available Bio-Me camera/scanner. 

Bio-Me will operate in a cloud environment to allow for scalability and ease of access. It will also utilize high quality camera and fingerprint scanner capable of touchless fingerprint capture. 

This solution ideally seeks to help any and all patient going to healthcare providers. Unfortunately, as the US medical system has been historically and continues to be unfair to groups such as people of color, women, and the poor. For added measure, the pandemic has shown that the poor and people of color have routinely worse outcomes with Covid. Issues such as patient mix-up almost certainly affect the patients in these groups. It is my hope that Bio-Me will be able to reduce the number patient mix-ups, improve patient provider relationship, and give healthcare providers confidence in the work they are doing. In the future, Bio-Me hopes to continuously engage both patients and healthcare providers on how we can better serve them and grow the Bio-Me platform.

By allowing healthcare providers biometrically verified medical records in an efficient and seamless manner, we can reduce the amount of time to provide identity assurance, reduce providers' direct contact with patients, and keep healthcare facilities sterile by utilizing Bio-Me's touchless solution.

This is currently a concept only. I consult on biometrics for public and private companies and I developed the idea during the pandemic. Since the pandemic began, hospitals and other healthcare providers have had their hands full and as a result would not be able to conduct any pilots.

Biometrics have been around for decades, but in the last 5 years, commercial use of biometrics has steadily expanded. While biometrics is commonplace in airports, iPhones, and law enforcement, they have yet to be used in the healthcare industry. Furthermore, biometrics have been traditionally used for the singular use of identity verification. With Bio-Me, patients can use biometrics to control and share access to their medical information. Once Bio-Me reaches enough consumers, it can be broadly expanded to the pharmaceutical industry to verify patients are getting their correct medications. Outside of the US, socialized healthcare systems can use Bio-Me to allow patients to be identified and treated quickly at opposite ends of the country. It can further be used to allow travelers around the world to access to their medical records in foreign countries.

The solution is still in it's concept phase and currently serves 0 people. In a year, I hope to serve 5 healthcare providers. In 5, I hope to serve 100+ healthcare providers.

The indicators used to measure success would be the True Match Rate and False Positive Identification Rate to track the performance of biometric matching system. Transaction counts and overall patients/user counts will also be tracked to help inform any growth decisions. In addition, patient and healthcare provider satisfaction will always be monitored to help improve the system and experience going forward.

Currently the solution team is me, a consultant focusing on biometrics implementation, and my sister, a mechanical engineer.

I have currently working helping the government analyze and set requirements for airline operators implementing biometrics at airports. This includes assisting on experiment/pilot design, architecture development, data analysis, and cyber security analysis. My sister is a mechanical engineer with a focus in CAD and industrial design.

Going forward, we look to include individuals from a range of professional backgrounds who can help us grow and succeed ethically. In recent years biometrics, facial recognition especially, has been criticized for being less accurate analyzing people of color. With this in mind, we believe it is imperative that our leadership team understands that we need to set minimum performance standards for all ethnicities and genders with our product.