New Hampshire Hospital Uses Smart Card Patient Access System
LifeMed Card Inc. recently announced that it has successfully installed its new smart card-based patient access system, LifeMed at The Memorial Hospital in North Conway, N.H.
LifeMed has been developed for hospitals to quickly and accurately identify patients and help manage them through the admissions process. Patients now have the ability to view and contribute to their overall medical records, giving the hospital a more complete medical picture of the patient.
LifeMed smart cards will be issued and utilized during patient registration at The Memorial Hospital, as well as its three ancillary facilities. Each patient at memorial will be issued a branded The Memorial Hospital smart card. Total issuance is expected to be beyond 30,000 cards. The smart card will store patient demographic, insurance and medical information, allowing pre-registration and automated admission into the hospital. All information contained on the smart card is protected by sophisticated security encryption algorithms, making the data virtually impossible to steal.
“We expect patients to embrace smart cards to manage their medical data, not only at the hospital, but as a method of connecting to and controlling their electronic patient health records,” said David Batchelor, LifeMed’s CEO. “With so much discussion regarding the development of patient health records, we believe we have a real-world answer to connecting patients, providers, physician, and clinics to correct, and up-to-date information. This is a major step towards ensuring patient-centered healthcare and supports making electronic patient health records a reality”.
“As a Critical Access Hospital in the Mt. Washington Valley, we wanted to make sure that our patients have a positive healthcare experience,” said Lawrence Carbonaro, director of patient access for The Memorial Hospital “Our mission is to deliver exceptional healthcare and with the LifeMed platform, we have the ability to extend that delivery to the non-medical services, including the admissions process. The chief complaint that almost every hospital gets about the admissions process is “We really don’t want to take the time to fill out the same forms time and time again and have lengthy waiting periods. With the LifeMed software, that problem is alleviated and the wait time is greatly reduced.”