Know Your Patient – Optimizing The Verification Process In Healthcare Sector

In this digital era, every industry is facing modifications as Covid-19 has brought many challenges for onboarding secure clients. The healthcare industry is prone to risks since there has been an upsurge in the number of deceitful activities in recent times. For onboarding the patients, hospitals are adopting digital means to facilitate and identify patients. These can include online reports, prescriptions, and obtaining consultancy attainment along with withholding data about a patient’s identity and insurance details. This has become the primary reason why criminals are getting attracted to target this industry. It is essential that the healthcare industry implies the Know Your Patient solutions to restrict minors from accessing age-restricted medicines while satisfying the legal requirement. It will help in combating healthcare frauds, protect data privacy, and enable the automated ID verification of the patients. 

Helping the Hospitals to Identify Patients Effectively

Identifying patients has become a necessity for all the hospitals for keeping fraudsters at bay. While onboarding on a platform, traveling abroad, or opening a bank account, it puts liability on the customer to provide their identity documents. The patient verification procedure is seamless and user-friendly through which only genuine patients will be onboarded. The Know Your Patient process asks the individuals to provide their genuine case histories along with their identity documents which should not be older than three months to determine the authenticity of the patient. 

Since the Covid-19 pandemic has hit the globe and created difficult consequences for the healthcare sector to handle, the following procedure has aided to replace the paper method with the digital verification process:

Submitting the ID Documents

To verify patient identity digitally, they are asked to upload an image of an identity document associated with them consisting of the required information such as name, age, address, etc. It can be any government-issued document for example driver’s license, passport, bank document, etc.

Detecting the Facial Feature

Next, the user submits a real-time selfie to cross-match their facial features with the provided identity document. Any case of impersonation can get detected during this stage.

Executing the Process of ID verification

After examining the user’s data, the system then proceeds with the ID verification for pharmacies and other healthcare affiliates. 

Dispatching the Results

Once the AI-based system detects no signs of forgeries, the verification results are displayed to the user and are stored in the back office while making an API call. 

Common Use Cases for Verifying Patients Digitally

Ensuring Safety of Patients’ Data

As directed by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPA), the prime obligation of the healthcare industry is to provide safety to its patients by protecting their medical records. With online patient verification procedures enabled, hospitals can supervise, manage and update the patient’s data in their database frequently. Data violations and medical data breaches can be reduced by identifying patients while saving the healthcare industry from facing hefty fines. 

Implying the Patient Age Verification Process to Restrict Minors 

Every industry is making a shift to digital platforms which has raised many concerns for companies who sell age-restricted products. The pharmaceutical industry can face huge penalties if they are unable to abide by the laws to restrict minors from the reach of age-restricted drugs. People placing orders for delivering the required medicines at home has eased the purchasing process. All they are required to do is to upload the picture of their prescription. Even medical consultancies can be managed through live calls. Many cases of prescription fraud have arisen due to weak security measures as pharmacies were selling age-restricted products to minors. This can have negative consequences which can affect them and might lead to worse scenarios of causing death. 

Disclosing the Health Insurance Frauds 

In most cases, a patient’s identity is backed by health insurance policies so that medical treatments can get affordable. Criminals opt for identity breaches to gain access to free medical services and avail of medicines registered under the name of someone else. In addition to this, they can manipulate a patient’s case history by hacking the medical record database. To prevent these frauds, it has become mandatory for healthcare providers to ensure data integrity, and the safety of patients’ information while eliminating the cases of identity theft. 

Wrapping it Up

The healthcare industry is already prone to fraud but the recent Covid-19 situation has made things go much worse. This has initiated the demand for a patient verification system. Medical data breaches are skyrocketing in the healthcare industry as they store information that is highly sensitive. By implementing the Know Your Patient procedure, it will become feasible for the healthcare providers to save patients’ medical records and keep track of the information for fulfilling the purpose of updating them in the database while combating fraudulent activities.