The health care industry is expected to be one of the most rapid areas of adoption of biometric technology. Much activity in this area can be attributed to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), a law that addresses the way that health care is managed and administered in the U.S. Although much of the law relates to the transfer of health care services, there are a series of provisions regarding data security.

Health care providers have the option of deploying biometrics - among other technologies - to secure access to electronic medical records. Although the development of this segment of the HIPAA legislation is months away, there will be sanctions for non-compliance, and institutions must show readiness to comply at early stages. Biometrics, when deployed properly, can be an effective replacement for usernames and passwords in challenging heath care environments.

However, using biometrics in place of passwords requires that institutions limit problems of failure to enroll, false rejections, and false matches: areas where IBG has performed groundbreaking work since the late 1990's. Institutions are experimenting with a variety of technologies - fingerprint, facial recognition, iris-scan, and voice recognition - to determine deployability within their operational environment. IBG's experience with every major biometric technology and vendor can help your institution address its data security challenges. IBG brings substantial real-world experience to addressing problems of technology obsolescence, legacy integration, and privacy-sympathetic system design.