Securing Patient Data with Biometric Tech for Impact and Systems Change

Seth Cochran of Operation Fistula in the U.S. and Nick Bennett of Simprints in the United Kingdom will incorporate facial recognition technology from Simprints into their existing automated patient registry to better track and support women with obstetric fistula in low-resource settings. Obstetric fistula is caused during childbirth and leads to the uncontrolled release of bodily wastes. It is estimated that more than 2 million young women live with untreated obstetric fistula in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. They have set up a program to end fistula for every woman that has included developing a tablet or phone-based patient tracking and performance management system, which has been expanded to 15 countries. The challenge has been to accurately track individual patients from their initial identification through treatment to their managed reintegration into society. To address this, they will integrate and test two biometric technologies, fingerprinting and facial recognition, and evaluate their ability to accurately identify patients across different settings and people’s reactions to the technologies.