KYP, which stands for “Know your Patient”, is a crucial set of regulations that healthcare professionals must adhere to when dealing with their patients. It plays a vital role in ensuring the security and authenticity of patient information and medical records.
However, implementing and performing Know Your Patient checks is often complex and time-consuming. It can place a significant burden on your staff members and result in patient frustration due to extended waiting times. But don’t worry, we have a solution for you.
In this blog, we’ll explore the importance of knowing your patients, how the KYP process works, and, most importantly, how you can streamline your front-desk operations through automation.
What is Know Your Patient KYP?
Know Your Patient (KYP) is the regulation that highlights the importance of accurately identifying patients before providing them with medical services. These KYP checks play a crucial role in ensuring that pharmacies or hospitals share sensitive medical information, test results, and prescriptions with the rightful patient, not a fraudster.
Why are Know Your Patient checks needed?
In order to safeguard patients from fraudulent activity and identity theft, countries have established rules that require hospitals and pharmacies to verify the identity of their patients.
In essence, implementing KYP checks helps to protect privacy-sensitive data from falling into the wrong hands. Failure to comply with these regulations can result in substantial penalties and fines. In the following sections, we’ll provide an overview of these regulations in Europe and the United States.
Please note that it’s important to verify the specific regulations of your country and provide detailed information accordingly.
Know Your Patient regulations in United States
The United States doesn’t have specific regulations in place regarding KYP. However, they have the HIPPA which stands for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. This regulation obliges health institutions in America to implement safety steps to protect sensitive data of patients.
Know Your Patient regulations in EU
Similar to the United States, European countries need to comply with GDPR which is here to ensure the confidentiality and protection of personal information. To comply with these rules, healthcare organizations must set up KYP checks to verify a patient’s identity and protect personal data.
Know Your Patient regulations in United Kingdom
Also UK institutions are required to adhere to GDPR regulations. Furthermore, they must comply with DPA 2018 which outlines guidelines for handling personal data and grants individuals the right to access their own information.
Now that we know why KYP is needed and how it’s regulated, let’s discover how the process actually works.
How does the KYP process work?
As we’ve seen earlier, KYP checks are a set of rules that hospitals or pharmacies must follow to avoid medical identity theft. To comply with it, identity and age verification are required.
Performing these processes manually places a significant burden on healthcare workers. They have to check and review identity documents, enter patient data in computer progrems, make sure to make no typos and, most importantly, reassure and comfort the patient.
Therefore, more and more healthcare organizations are turning towards automation. It can free your staff from repetitive, error-prone tasks, leaving them more time for more important things, such as patient well-being.
Let’s see how such an automated process works:
- To begin, the patient must send their identity documents via email or upload them into a software application. These documents can include ID cards or passports, as well as their health insurance card or medical prescription.
- Using OCR technology, the software will automatically extract all the relevant data from the documents.
- Additionally, the system can flag any fraudulent documents, which greatly reduces the time needed for verification to just a few seconds.
After verifying the authenticity of documents, and to avoid identity spoofing, biometric verification can be added to the onboarding or authentication process of patients:
- Liveness detection is one of the possibilities during patient onboarding or authentication. Patients can be required to perform specific movements to ensure their physical presence. By requesting different actions, this process can’t be anticipated, making it difficult for fraudsters.
- Additionally, selfie checks can be performed. The patients are required to take a selfie with their smartphone. The selfie is compared with the submitted ID for more security.
In a nutshell, automated ID verification for healthcare allows you to automatically verify ID documents, and detect fraud. This process saves the time of workers, and is simple and user-friendly for your patients.
Benefits of automating Know Your Patient checks
- Protect patient’s sensitive data: Conducting Know Your Patient (KYP) checks is crucial to ensure the privacy of patient data. With software, you can easily anonymize data from your patients making their data not usable by fraudsters.
- Prevent fraud: Access to personal information should only be granted to the patients and medical staff. Operating KYP checks is all about verifying that the patients are who they say they are.
- Ensure accuracy in the patient’s information: Using OCR software allows you to accurately extract the data from your patients’ ID documents, avoiding human error.
- Shorten the patient’s waiting time: By using automation, you can reduce turnaround time by up to 90%. You can also onboard and authenticate patients remotely, freeing up your staff’s time.
- Improve the overall patient experience: By reducing wait time and protecting data to eliminate frustration, the patient experience improves considerably.
Now that we’ve seen how automating your KYP checks can be beneficial, we’ll cover some concrete use cases when these checks occur.
Use Cases of KYP in healthcare
- New Patient Onboarding: When a new patient seeks medical care, healthcare providers require them to verify their identity. The process involves submitting various documents. These documents may include passports, ID cards, insurance information, and prescriptions.
The healthcare service must then verify the authenticity of these documents which can be difficult by only the human-eye. Therefore, using an automated ID verification solution allows you to verify automatically and accurately ID documents with AI. After verification, the software sends the data to the healthcare’s system. No manual data entry is needed which minimizes considerably human-errors.
Identity verification is crucial to prevent fraud, protect patient privacy, and ensure that the right medical history and treatment plans are associated with the correct individual. By accurately verifying the identity of new patients, healthcare providers can deliver safe and effective care while maintaining the integrity of patient data.
- Age verification for medication purchase: A common scenario occurs when buying medicine from a pharmacy. In some cases, the medication cannot be given to a patient unless they are of a certain age. Therefore, age verification is necessary to ensure that the patient receiving the medication is not a minor.
Pharmacies can conduct age verification by asking the patient to make a picture of an official document with their date of birth. ID verification software can then verify the document and extract the age of the individual automatically within a few seconds. Pharmacies can leave their doubts behind when giving medication to patients, and ensure compliance with ease.
- Granting access to medical records: To access their medical records, patients need to prove their identity. These records can contain information about their diagnosis and prescription, so it’s important that only the patient and their doctor have access.
Patients are often asked to provide their emails and passwords. Unfortunately, due to increased risk of cybercrime, it’s often not the best solution. Alternative authentication methods should be used instead.
To ensure accurate identification, for example, biometric verification such as liveness detection can be used. This involves the patient performing a random head movement to confirm that they are physically present and not using a photo, or a deepfake to gain access. If the patient’s identity is verified, the access can be granted.
Using an automated ID verification solution can help healthcare providers in their daily work. Additionally, it ensures privacy and improves the overall experience of patients. Let us introduce you to our solution, Klippa’s ID verification solution.
Automate KYP checks with Klippa’s ID verification solution
Automated identity verification solutions, like Klippa’s software, make KYP checks simple and easy. With our software, you can process ID documents from over 150 countries with automated data extraction, verification, organization, and anonymization using cutting-edge AI technology.
Plus, our software can anonymize sensitive information, ensuring GDPR compliance. And that’s not all! Our software has multiple modules that can work together or separately, providing various functionalities to our users.
- Accurately verify the authenticity of ID documents
- Use AI algorithms to detect document fraud
- Eliminate the risk of identity theft through biometric verification
- Use data masking to add an extra layer of security and be GDPR compliant
- Easy to integrate into existing software through API or SDK
Curious to know more about our solution? Feel free to contact us or book a demo below!