Nearly six out of ten top health care leaders participated in the recent Polls Said that their organization’s primary digital transformation goal is to improve patient access. More than simply guiding patients to schedule appointments or review medical records, the goal is to allow patients to easily gain digital access to all the resources they may need throughout the healthcare process.
A few forward-looking health systems have achieved leadership in this regard. They are providing patients with new ways to access their own health data better, faster, and more securely. In doing so, they drew on the experience of the banking, travel and retail industries, which have provided digital front doors many years ago.
Healthcare should be no different. Pew Charitable Trust’s 2020 survey Found that 61% of Americans want to access their health data on their mobile devicesBut consumers’ desire for real-time mobile access to their health data is in stark contrast to the industry’s ongoing struggle to identify patients.
Patient ID is a friction point for consumers
Remotely verifying the identity of patients is essential for giving them access to protected health data-but it is not easy. Despite the increased adoption of the latest health IT solutions, there are still too many health service organizations that continue to use outdated identification methods, such as requiring patients to be physically present to verify their identities before receiving increasingly virtualized medical services.
In addition, in order to access their health and insurance information, consumers usually have to log in to multiple portals, each with different credentials and security protocols.
I know this problem too well. My chronically ill daughter has more than 12 different username/password combinations for her patient portal. When using a third-party application, she must re-enter these credentials every 90 days or when the third-party application requests other data fields that are available. With the continuous development of technology, these traditional authentication methods have become obsolete outside of healthcare. To ensure fast, easy, and digital access to patients, healthcare needs to quickly utilize improved methods and technologies related to identity.
The cost of maintaining the status quo is high.Patient identification problem The industry spends US$6 billion annually, and the average hospital spends US$1.5 million According to Black Book Research, among the denied claims. The rapid rise of telemedicine during the Covid-19 pandemic has further exacerbated the challenge of digital identity management. In order to realize remote care, many places are using new equipment. This reality makes it more important than ever for healthcare organizations to look for areas where they can improve their current digital identity management practices.
Digital ID Proof
The obvious answer is digital identification. It can be done via a mobile phone, and it adds a whole new field of opportunity to ensure that you are unique. In addition, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed standards to help ensure that companies can trust their cross-industry identities. NIST’s Identity Assurance Level 2 (IAL2) is the strongest standard that can be achieved, without the need for people to show themselves, and healthcare should be standardized.
Digital identity verification through mobile phones or desktops enables consumers to personally control their identities and solve many problems that arise during the nursing interaction process, including everything from redundant paper forms to registration and waiting time. Patients seem to be eager to use this technology. In the Pew survey, 67% of respondents said they support enhanced patient identification methods to obtain their data.
New solutions for healthcare
Few companies know more about identity verification through multiple sources than the global payment company MasterCard. In the past half century, MasterCard has established a global payment network that can safely process more than 75 billion transactions on 2.5 billion cards in 210 countries and regions each year.
Using this experience, MasterCard launched its identity verification service for healthcare in the spring of 2021. The solution combines government ID scanning, facial biometric technology with live detection, and mobile phone intelligence to provide a high success rate for automatic user verification. It is designed to meet the federal government’s highest level of assurance of identification for remote consumers. This accuracy is reflected in the 87% success rate of ID Verification in verifying user identities and pre-filling their personal information, thereby providing more accurate user data.
During the Covid-19 outbreak last summer, a health system in Wisconsin served 600,000 residents in 180 points of care, becoming the first US health system to implement a MasterCard solution. The digital front door application of the health system is produced by our company, which enables patients to view their health at a glance and integrates all their medical, insurance and related records into a permanent mobile location.
Mastercard ID verification allows ThedaCare patients to obtain an account and access their information without having to present their driver’s license and insurance card in person. It can also quickly identify users of the digital front door application of the health system without having to keep multiple login names and passwords. Since it is faster than the previous method, it also reduces the loss of patients during the registration process by 35%.
Although this new technology is a big step forward, it is not without its flaws. For example, consumers who do not have a mobile phone cannot complete the identity verification workflow because they need a mobile phone to verify their identity. We must establish a separate workflow for these people. In addition, the data supporting the information provided by consumers comes from many different sources and is not always accurate. About 22% of consumers had to modify some pre-filled information to verify their identity.
Is it time to cancel the portal?
These defects are relatively easy to correct. What is not easy to change is the inertia of “the way things have always been.” Too many healthcare stakeholders continue to let consumers use outdated patient portals to access their information. Given the higher level of identification now provided through innovations such as MasterCard, it is time to ask if we should require patients to have a portal account.
Instead, we should work hard like ThedaCare and a handful of other digital transformation leaders to find new and better ways to eliminate friction among healthcare consumers. Although companies such as Amazon and Wal-Mart continue to raise the bar for a satisfying digital experience, healthcare is far behind.
As the experiences of my daughter and countless others have shown, it is too difficult for consumers to do anything in healthcare.
Photo: invincible_bullldog, Getty Images
