Goodbye Clipboard, Hello Patient Palm Scanning At NYU

Patients at NYU Langone Medical Center no longer have to fill out the dreaded clipboard with their medical history or insurance data each time they come in for care because the Manhattan academic medical center has switched to palm recognition technology to identify and authenticate its patients.  NYU Langone said that it went live June 5 across its enterprise with a product called PatientSecure, from Tampa-based vendor HT Systems, that scans the veins in the palm with near-infrared light. Citing statistics from the vendor, Bernard A. Birnbaum, MD, senior vice president, vice dean, and chief of hospital operations at NYU Langone, said vein recognition is 100 times more accurate than fingerprinting. "It had the highest accuracy and highest usability of any biometric technology we looked at."