Patient identification using biometric systems at the Hospital de Clínicas

A univocal way to identify persons is a need in Hospital Information Systems, to the point of being an essential requirement for Electronic Health Record (EHR) Systems. In Paraguay, a country with a significant rate of people without identity documents, and particularly in the Hospital de Clínicas (HC), which in general provides medical care to low-income people, this requirement must be carefully attended. This article analyzes the consequences of this fact in the management of the HC and proposes the use of an Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS). In this context, we evaluate AFIS options with free software license and open source code, go into details about SourceAFIS and show experimental results. At the end, we present some future works aimed to put in practice this proposal in the HC.