By Barley Laing, the UK Managing Director at Melissa
When a patient presents themselves at a healthcare setting it is often a challenge to quickly identify who they are.
Staff operating both on and offline in this sector need to easily confirm who is this person presenting themselves for treatment. Are they expected or a walk-in? Have they got existing records? Are they even eligible for the treatment on offer? These questions need to be answered quickly in a non-intrusive manner.
Fast patient verification a necessity
What is required is the effective means to verify patients to enable a much faster resolution regarding who they are, and what path they should be on. This will lead to better patient management with faster appointment handling and subsequent care, which can help to ease congestion and ultimately bring down waiting times. It will also enhance care quality with patients receiving the right care at the right time.
This necessitates undertaking automated high-speed, rigorous validation checks for patients at check-in, which enhances organisational efficiency by speeding up the onboarding process, and improves care routing, ensuring patients receive appropriate care without delay.
This non-intrusive approach also provides compliance assurance, with regulatory requirements met with vigorous validation checks.
Finally, it will help with fraud prevention, highlighting those not eligible for free treatment or prescriptions. This is vital when the NHS Counter Fraud Authority estimates that the organisation loses around £1.264 billion to fraud, bribery and corruption every year. A huge sum.
It’s also important to bear in mind that by preventing fraud potential sanctions are avoided, along with reputation issues resulting from the ensuing publicity.
The patient verification service must be easy to deploy and use
Most importantly, the patient verification service sourced must be easy to deploy and use in real-time, so anybody authorised to do so can use it when they need to. Therefore, it needs to be a no code, out of the box ready to use always on online portal for smart devices and desktops. Crucially, such a tool doesn’t need investment in time and money when it comes to integration.
Using a service that offers all this is much better than undertaking slow and costly manual checks of a patient’s ID which needs to be consigned to the past.
3-2-1 traffic light approach to patient verification
Bear in mind any patient verification service sourced should use a layered 3-2-1 traffic light approach to confirm an individual’s identity and approval for care. This should start with a contact data check – verifying the name, address, email and phone records of the patient. Once the contact elements are verified the second step is to confirm proof of address by matching the name to an address. This should be made against government, credit agency and utility records. The final step is an age verification and deceased register check. This ensures the individual is age appropriate for the course of action or treatment, and the person to be checked-in has not assumed the identity of someone deceased, to help prevent fraud.
Furthermore, a vital feature every patient verification tool needs to have is the facility to offer a single check so individual patients can be validated against global datasets in real-time.
Batch processing in volume is also an important feature of any tool to ensure databases are up to date with patient contact details, with checks made to ensure their name matches with their address. This will save organisations time and precious budget by ensuring patient details are always up to date, with volume processing implemented by authorised staff as and when required.
A focus on improving efficiency using technology in the NHS is something all the main political parties agree on. One important way to deliver this is to use an online automated patient verification service, which is significantly quicker, more accurate and cost effective in undertaking patient verification and preventing fraud than manual checks. This technology requires no additional staffing or training costs, and there is no risk of human error. By using such a service healthcare organisations deliver streamlined patient management, greater efficiencies and enhanced care quality, which is vital with the continued pressure on budgets.
Biography of Barley Laing, UK Managing Director at Melissa
Barley Laing joined Melissa and set up the UK office in 2014 during an exciting expansion phase of the California headquartered company.
As Managing Director, with 26 years of technology and data industry experience, his role is focused on meeting the data quality and ID/compliance needs for organisations in the UK and worldwide.
Barley and the team at Melissa have experience in working for NHS Trusts and the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), as well as Lambeth Council, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and GCHQ.
