Identity verification is not just required in the financial industry to control money laundering practices or to secure the financial assets of a bank. The need for verification has expanded itself far beyond that. The antecedents for this expanded horizon of verification in different industries include fraudulent activities, rising scams, and manipulative activities including data tempering. In the medical industry, verifying patient identity has also emerged to be an important element. This is because in many organizations data breach has been observed in the pharma industry. According to a report published online, it is claimed that a company named AMCA was alleged for a data breach exposing 2.2 million patients’ data. 

Advantages of KYP

‘Know Your Patient’ or KYP is basically an extended dimension of KYC with reference to its integration into the healthcare industry. The emerging practice of patient verification has a lot of benefits to offer in the long run. Moreover, the need for introducing guidelines to verify patients was actually felt because of the increasing fraud. Fraud does not necessarily involve an entity that could be viewed with the eye of being a criminal. 

The real drivers of this process of verifying a patient are actually the patients themselves. For instance, pharmacies have observed that minors are coming to take medicines as guided by the elders just to save their time. This poses a serious threat to the community and the medical industry if it provides the drugs without verification. Thus, identity verification for pharmacies has been made mandatory by the legal bodies.   

Prevents Misuse of Prescriptions

The implementation of KYP guidelines helps in the patient’s age verification process because it has bound the pharmacies, especially the ones operating online stores, to verify the age of their patients before giving them the required medicine. Age verification is necessary for the minor population of the countries who try to misuse the prescription of their elders to acquire drugs for ill purposes. Thus, the rule of patient verification will help to restrict children from taking advantage of any leniency, and also it will help to warn the pharmacies not to entertain such demands under any condition.

Eliminating Insurance Fraud

Online insurance companies have also started to rely on digital verification solutions that are supported by artificial intelligence. Patient verification is ensured through digital mediums because in this way the healthcare companies are able to fight against insurance fraud. For instance, an imposter posing to be a patient with proper identity whereas, in actuality, he is not that patient. In these types of confusing scenarios, the digital patient identification process helps a lot of pharmacies and hospitals because they are able to track the ID of the fake patient. 

Patient Record Keeping

The KYP guidelines are not just demanded to be implemented in the hospitals and pharmacies on their own independently. Patient identity is verified according to the legal guidelines of KYP. But, this procedure is further strengthened to minimize the chances of any negligence from the governing bodies. 

For the said purpose, the government of different regions has maintained a record of all the patients’ information that is gathered by different hospitals. This mechanism of duplication of data for the purpose of keeping a backup has enabled optimum data protection. It provides security to the patient and the hospitals if any problem arises in the future. This is because now the patient verification is handled with a shared sense of responsibility.

Eliminating Human Error

The process of patient identification is in line with the guidelines of KYP along with the integration of digital verification solutions. This has led to the elimination of human mistakes and prohibited biased human interference (like giving medicines to minors or elders without requiring a prescription). Digital verification enables a transparent procedure of identification where a patient’s data is stored in the servers, unable to be stolen or tempered because all the required operations are performed by the AI-supported software solution for verification. 

Final Thoughts

Patient verification has become an inevitable process. Patient identification has appeared to be one of the most neglected dimensions of the medical industry. The ignorance of pharmaceutical companies and providing medicines in an unauthorized manner has led to the consideration of developing KYP digital solutions for patient verification with maximum accuracy. The emergence of digital verification practices is likely to decrease the cases of data breaches, privacy issues, and illegal access to medicines. It will help to fortify patients’ security, and therefore the reputation of pharmacies and hospitals as well.