Proposal on
Implementation of Biometric in Health care system
By – Parthivi Shrivastava
Introduction
Biometrics is the measurement and statistical analysis of people's unique physical and behavioral characteristics. This technology is used for user’s identification and access control. Using this technology, a person can be uniquely identify by their physical characteristics such as facial recognition, fingerprints, finger geometry (the size and position of fingers), iris recognition, vein recognition, retina scanning, voice recognition and DNA matching. and behavior characteristics such as recognition of typing patterns, walking gait and other gestures.
Biometric system can provide solutions for national security and can prevent identity theft and fraud. Governments, businesses and organizations uses biometric systems to get more information about individuals or about a populace. Many biometric systems are developed for security applications. An airport scanning device, a "bio-password" system, or an internal data gathering protocol is an example of a biometric system that uses identifying data for a security result.
Even though AI and usage of biometrics is in huge demand but there are sectors where the usage of biometric is less. Our healthcare industry is one such industry which lacks in this technology usage. One of the area where we need this type of technology is in maintaining health records of a person.
It is very hard to keep a health record of a person who suffered from a disease 15 years ago to maintain a record for so long and for the hospital to keep a record for such cases. Ideally people throw these records after like 5 years because nobody thinks that these records are required which sometimes creates a problem in urgent cases when health history is needed but no information can be provided.
My Idea is to create a centralized web application which stores people health history and records which can be linked to hospitals where the hospital authorities can upload the health records of the patients on this web application. The hospital will be using SSN once these hospitals are registered on this application. This web application will be integrated with biometric software. A biometric reader will be used to scan the fingerprints to identify the user.
Literature review
Biometrics technology is being used in many sectors and application such as to scan fingerprints for criminal investigations, used by governments for user authentications , thumb impressions are being used in government offices or private companies for user logins and logouts (attendance) ,used in phones – face recognition , used in phones – thumb impressions for access the phone , used by Banking industry for account creations and authentications .
Although biometrics is being used in almost in every industry, but our healthcare industry is still lacking. One of the key frames where we can use biometrics technology is in Electronic health reports system. Designing a EHR system will be a lot helpful to the Hospital as well to the patients.
There is a huge demand to move paper-based health records to electronics-based record system.” Recent proposals suggest that integrated health records provide many benefits (2), some of which include: a reduction in costs, improved quality of care, the promotion of evidence-based medicine and record keeping and mobility”.
People find it difficult to maintain paper-based health records. It becomes very hard to maintain old records and keep them handy all the time. For example – In an emergency accident case, the person who is injured and unconscious cannot provide his health history or any sort of records since he is not in senses, and it makes it hard for hospital to provide emergency medications or operate the person without knowing about health history.
Although many hospitals have started implementing electronic health record system along with the paper-based system, but not all the hospital has implemented the system. Moreover, current EHR systems lacks in terms of security and privacy. Health information is considered one of the most confidential personal information and to maintain the confidentiality is essential. “Privacy involves access control versus any party not authorized to access the data, and has been defined as the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others “(3).
To overcome the privacy issue, designing an EHR system which uses biometrics technology as the main identification base to authenticate the person and access his/her records. The EHR system along with biometric system will be accessible to all the hospital. The main motive of designing o Every person will have their profile created on the web application to stores their identity along with impression of their thumb and or face, which will be linked to their profile using a biometric reader. Whenever a patient or a new patient comes in the hospital, they will have to put their thumb on the biometric reader which will capture the entry of that person in the hospital and once the consultation of the patient is done then the data will then be added to patient profile on the application as a record file of the patient. These records file will store all the paper work related to the patient such as consultation, blood work, test, medication record in the digital form. These records will be uploaded by the hospital authority under the patient profile. So, the next time the same person or an accident case comes in to any hospital, the doctor of any hospital can take out the health history of the person using the biometric technology. In this way records will tact safe and tracking of a patient history can be done for urgent emergency cases (accidents) as well.
Purpose Statement
The main purpose of this idea is to reduce the use of paper health records and make all the records web based so that people don’t have to carry around records and chances off misplacing the records will be less. In this way, records can be easily accessed during emergency cases as well. Also, implementing this technology will provide security for the records.
Methodology
The above idea follows the below methodology –
1. Designing a web application –
The first step is to create a centralized Java based web application which will contain a registration for user profile that will include fields like – name, age, blood group, address, number. There will be biometric such as their thumb impressions, iris scan, photo (for face recognition). The application will also have a hospitals access section to upload the health records for the patients. The web application will be using Single Sign On which the hospitals will be using once the hospitals gets the access to upload and view the records once the patient scans the thumb on the reader which will provide the hospital with health records of the patients.
2. Integrating the biometric reader –
Biometric reader will be implemented using Cloud-based Biometric Solutions: The cloud solution is the most advanced and latest way to use biometric authentication in web applications. CloudABIS, a cloud-based biometric system that will allow you to complete this process.
3. View for the website –
We will be using HTML and CSS for the front end of the website. The above tools will display and style the content.
4. Use of Mongo DB –
The website will use Mongo DB database to store user static and dynamic data. Static data will be the user’s name, blood group. Dynamic data will consist of age. The database will be designed in such a manner that it auto increments the age for each year. This database will also store health records uploaded by the hospitals.
5. Memcached to avoid load –
Memcached will be used as a caching system to reduce the load on the database and to handle large amounts of traffic.
6. Apache server for data request –
We will be using the apache server to handle requests for data fetching.
7. Linking of Biometric system –
We will be linking biometric system with the web application using BioconX, which authenticates the identity of users with one-to-many search thus enabling them to access all servers and applications for which they have authorization. The biometric reader will be installed in the hospital and will be connected to the WIFI.
8. The end result –
The result is to make a web based electronic system to store health records and make it accessible to the doctors in emergency cases like accident and to make the paper less health records. The records should be authenticated using biometric system.
Deliverables
I think these could be some of the minimum requirements: –
• The biometric reader should scan the user finger prints and calls the details of the user linked to the finger prints.
• The application must be able to interact with a database and can request and receive appropriate records.
• The application must be able to provide the patient record history.
Timeline
• I plan to complete the capstone proposal project within 3 months starting now and submit it by the end March.
• If approved the timeline for testing, I would want to test the two months (April and May).
• I Plan to present my capstone defense by the end of June.