Health Care Can Learn From Global Use of Biometrics

Examples from other industries could offer lessons for linking patient medical records

Overview

Americans use scans of their fingerprints, faces, or eyes to access mobile devices, board airplanes, obtain admission into theme parks, and in numerous other ways to make everyday tasks more efficient. Across the world, individuals use these types of biometrics to obtain government services, bank, and travel.

Yet despite widespread use of biometrics in a range of industries, these tools are not employed in the United States to address a key problem that has plagued the health care system for decades: patient matching, or the ability to accurately link health records for the same person across different sites of care, such as...