Palm Reading Comes to Healthcare
By Michael VizardEdited by Sarah Varney
June 28, 2009
If you believe in the supernatural then whenever you get sick, maybe you visit your friendly neighborhood palm reader instead of a primary care physician. Well, sometime in the future when those of us who aren’t believers visit the doctor, having a palm reading may actually be one of the first things we encounter. 
And no, this isn’t the first sign of a merger of the supernatural with Western medicine. When you visit a hospital, clinic or doctor’s office, you typically only spend a relatively short period of time with the physician. The rest of the experience is spent communicating registration information, explaining the nature of your illness to a nurse and then waiting to see the doctor. Often, this process results in a sub-optimal experience at a time when most people are not in the mood or condition to deal with a whole lot of red tape.
But imagine if you went to see a physician and all you had to do was wave your palm over a device that would instantly pull all your medical records and billing history in a matter of seconds.
That’s exactly what’s happening at Springfield Clinic in Springfield, Illinois, where patients are greeted by a kiosk they use to identify themselves by holding their palm over a small black box. That little box contains PalmSecure software developed by Fujitsu that uses the veins in your palm to identify who you are. That information is then relayed from a kiosk built by a company called AllScripts to an electronic records system that pulls up all your data.
It turns out that every person has a unique set of complex veins in their palm that the Fujitsu software can use to uniquely identify each individual. This is a better approach than using a fingerprint reader because not every individual has a readable set of fingerprints, and over time the readers themselves can become unusable as oil and grease from hundreds of fingerprints build up on the device.
The next step, according to James Hewitt, chief information officer (CIO) for Springfield Clinic, is to then use the same Fujitsu technology to make that only authorized people have access to your medical records. Unfortunately, there have been some high-profile incidents where sensitive information about a celebrity’s health issue has been accessed by unauthorized individuals that later sold that information to tabloid newspapers.
With palm reader software in place, healthcare providers could better ensure the privacy of electronic healthcare records by making sure only specific individuals could access that information.
Healthcare organizations are trying to streamline the processes associated with providing healthcare both as a competitive tool to attract more patients and as a way to save costs.
For patients, this ultimately means that the processes associated with receiving healthcare are finally going to get less painful as the amount of time it takes to receive that care starts to finally get sharply reduced.
Please read our legal disclaimer.
Write a comment
- Required fields are marked with *.
Bookmark with:
What are these?