There have been various threads here about fingerprinting, though most of them have focused on technical implementation details. As PIH is scaling up our fingerprinting efforts in Haiti and Liberia, we wanted to solicit some feedback from those who have been using it regarding facility workflows/processes…
Timing: How many seconds does it typically take from moment finger hits scanner to pulling up the patient chart?
Estimated % of clients where fingerprinting does not work (either false negatives or false positives or instances where a print cannot be detected)?
Do you fingerprint kids/infants? Or at what age do you start fingerprints?
What has been the experience with fingerprint equipment durability?
Anyone experimenting with other biometric measures?
Hello @ddesimone here are some of the experiences from UgandaEMR.
We have about 62 Health centers Using fingerprint in their clinics. the biggest health centre with about 30000 patients.
We use a solution from Cross match with device Digital Persona 4500
I will answer your questions in a chronological order
Timing: It takes less than a second to load the launch the patient dashboard when a patient puts their finger on the device
Fingerprinting infants Yes we do fingerprint infants above 5 year
Durability When a device is well taken care of that is good storage it should be able to serve more than 2 years. Some fingerprint devices dont do well in dusty environments.
disinfect Its a thought that I will put forward in our implementation.
@slubwama - Wow, very impressive (30k patients at one facility plus 62 facilities!) and very helpful details. Thank you.
Fingerprinting Infants / I am fresh to fingerprinting technology. One assumption: fingerprints of a 5 year old change over time so after some time the system may think this is a new patient. Is this accurate? If so, how often do you update fingerprints for kids? And at what age are the fingerprints stable? My quick reading says fingerprints are more stable around age 12 but curious for your experience for how you’ve handled this.
I’d also apprecaite learning more about your experieneces on rates of false negatives (clients accidentally duplicated in the system) or false positives (multiple matches coming up for one print). Any data or experience on these points?
For some context, PIH Liberia is slowly exploring biometrics as we begin working with Ministry of Health on unique IDs for EMR. We welcome any/all tips and experiences, and feel free to link me to any articles/reference documents that may be helpful.