The Role of Digital Identification for Healthcare : The Emerging Use Cases
Identification is crucial for the efficient and effective delivery of health services and public health management and is therefore instrumental for achieving sustainable development goal (SDG). Providers need to know a patient’s identity to access...
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
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World Bank, Washington, DC
2019
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/595741519657604541/The-Role-of-Digital-Identification-for-Healthcare-The-Emerging-Use-Cases http://hdl.handle.net/10986/31826 |
| Summary: | Identification is crucial for the
efficient and effective delivery of health services and
public health management and is therefore instrumental for
achieving sustainable development goal (SDG). Providers need
to know a patient’s identity to access relevant medical and
treatment histories and ensure that they are giving
consistent and appropriate care. Patients also need
documentation to prove enrollment in insurance programs or
other safety nets that cover medical expenses. As an
alternative to creating a health-specific functional
identification system, some countries have instead opted to
use existing foundational identification systems, such as
population registers, unique identification numbers (UINs)
or national ID (NID) cards, as the basis for patient
identification, verification, and authentication. The goal
of this paper is therefore to synthesize selected examples
of how foundational systems are used for healthcare in a
variety of countries. The authors hope that this initial
effort at framing the utility of foundational identification
for healthcare and providing early lessons and key
considerations will help guide future work in this area by
practitioners, donors, and researchers. This paper is
organized as follows: section one gives introduction.
Section two provides an overview of the main areas in which
using a foundational system is likely to impact healthcare.
Section three illustrates the impact areas using country
cases from Botswana, Estonia, India, Korea, and Thailand. In
light of these examples, section four discusses the key
issues for practitioners to consider when integrating
foundational identification into health care systems,
including high-level design issues and strategies for
maintaining data privacy and security. Section five provides
concluding thoughts. |
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