Fingerprinting may offer speedier registrations
Idea that drew laughs now draws praise
When Carolyn Shebel suggested an innovative use of technology for better patient registration at a conference, she drew mostly laughs from the crowd of 200 or so.
"They thought it was ridiculous," she recalls.
Her idea was to use fingerprint scanners to streamline the registration process. But her employer, La Porte (IN) Hospital, had enough faith in Shebel’s innovation drawn from her previous career as a court reporter to give her three months and enough funding to look into the possibilities.
After a trial run in late 1995, the system went live in April 1996. La Porte’s patient registration area now has seven fingerprint scanners connected to PCs. The process works like this:
Patients place their thumbs over the scanner, which takes a snapshot of the print and freezes it on the screen. A registrar enters the patient’s name, address, telephone number, insurance carrier, and other data, which are stored as a digital record on the hospital’s computer network.
The thumbprints are linked to those patient registration records, allowing patients to speed through admissions on subsequent visits. In those visits, patients simply put their thumbs on the scanner, and in seven to 10 seconds their records appear on the screen. The old system took several minutes to make a match.
Quick matches
Shebel interviewed three vendors, none of which had penetrated the health care market at that time, and her first choice NEC Technologies in Itasca, IL made a presenta- tion showing how its product worked in the law enforcement field.
In making the transition from law enforcement to health care, NEC, with Shebel’s participation, addressed such issues as increased volume the hospital has 5,000 emergency department visits each month, compared to the lower figures experienced in law enforcement. "The database had to take into account how quickly we needed matches," she says.
The fingerprint workstations, "including the scanner and everything you need," cost La Porte Hospital about $7,000 each; the price varies depending on the amount of data stored, Shebel says. The new process also required a new server to handle the large patient volumes effectively.
It took about a half a day to install the server and about 15 minutes per person to train staff to use the scanning system, she adds.
Rehab chosen for pilot project
The pilot project was done in the patient rehabilitation area, Shebel says. "We chose it because the patients come back two and three times a week, and we wanted to see how fast [their records] came up."
The rehab patients responded extremely well to the new system, which Shebel attributes to the "real positive, delicate way it was marketed.
"We wrote the patients a letter, asking if they would participate, so when they came in, it wasn’t a surprise," she says. "We explained the process, and the patients were real excited. We really didn’t have anybody that rejected it maybe two people." (See results of a survey on fingerprinting perceptions, below.)
As a bonus for their participation, patients received a decorative mug displaying their thumbprint.
Feedback on the surveys the hospital distributed was similarly positive, Shebel says. "One man said, My name is Robert, and so is my son’s, and so is my grandson’s, and I’m tired of getting their bills.’ Someone else mentioned the increased speed and efficiency of the process, and said that they felt safer: If they came in unconscious, the hospital would know who they were."
In addition to making a positive ID more quickly, benefits to the hospital include reducing duplicate medical records, Shebel notes. "A patient may say his name is John Doe, but we may have his files under Jack Doe."
With hospitals increasingly becoming part of large health care alliances, keeping track of a patient going from the family physician to the obstetrician to the psychiatrist is more difficult, she points out. "Trying to find that unique identifier is important."
Implementation is delicate’
Shebel’s new title director of physician information systems and support services for Lakeland Area Health Services reflects her latest challenge: She is working on a pilot fingerprint scanning program with a couple of physicians’ offices in the Lakeland system La Porte Hospital’s sister organization, which manages physician practices.
The pilot will tie those offices into the hospital’s server, she says. The hospital also is working on a wireless unit for the emergency department and for nurses on medical floors.
Meanwhile, Shebel says she has spoken about La Porte’s fingerprinting system to more than 50 hospitals, some of whom are putting such an item in their budgets or making it part of strategic planning. Her advice is to examine your processes closely before taking on such a project.
"Don’t just think it will be instant," she cautions. "Implementation is delicate."
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