CLEAR goes from passports to PHI
Recently, we featured a story on the unexpected marriage of healthcare and air travel. Today, I’d like to explore that connection again, in a new way.
If you’re a frequent traveler, you’re probably familiar with CLEAR.
The biometric identity verification technology company has a strong presence at airports throughout the U.S. CLEAR’s security slot reservation services have begun popping up at European air travel hubs over the past few years, too.
But the company’s expansion is not only focused on international air travel. CLEAR has its eyes on healthcare.
The company recently published the results of its partnership case study with electronic health information network Surescripts.
The study tackles a common, sticky issue in healthcare: patient data exchange and identity verification.
It’s the age-old issue of electronic health records (EHRs): portability. Ideally, health information should efficiently and securely travel with them from provider to provider, across city and state lines. In reality, the mess of interoperability challenges keeps this from happening as neatly as we’d like it to.
We’d all like to be like Taiwan, a country with an innovative EHR system centered around giving each individual a unique health ID attached to a physical card patients bring with them to all their medical visits.
However, without a centralized system like this, the issue of identity matching becomes especially challenging. In a large country like the U.S., things are especially tricky because of the disconnect between:
- private and public health systems
- state-based health plans
- private, competing EHR companies
- regional health information exchanges
Without solid identity verification technology, patient identity can get mixed up along any of data flow inflection points.
With the rise in cybersecurity breaches in healthcare, the idea of creating a centralized identity verification solution with CLEAR’s expertise may be “too good to be true,” as STAT reporter Mario Aguilar put it.
However, I’m more optimistic about this collaboration. Fostering partnerships across industries is how we defeat blind spots and encourage creative innovation. ‘
We deserve a more efficient, effective healthcare system, and only we can build it.
