Securing Electronic Medical Records Using Biometric Authentication

Ensuring the security of medical records is becoming an increasingly important problem as modern technology is integrated into existing medical services. As a consequence of the adoption of electronic medical records in the health care sector, it is becoming more and more common for a health professional to edit and view a patient’s record using a tablet PC. In order to protect the patient’s privacy, as required by governmental regulations in the United States, a secure authentication system to access patient records must be used. Biometric-based access is capable of providing the necessary security. On-line signature and voice modalities seem to be the most convenient for the users in such authentication systems because a tablet PC comes equipped with the associated sensors/hardware. This paper analyzes the performance of combining the use of on-line signature and voice biometrics in order to perform robust user authentication. Signatures are verified using the dynamic programming technique of string matching. Voice is verified using a commercial, off the shelf, software development kit. In order to improve the authentication performance, we combine information from both on-line signature and voice biometrics. After suitable normalization of scores, fusion is performed at the matching score level. A prototype bimodal authentication system for accessing medical records has been designed and evaluated on a small truly multimodal database of 50 users, resulting in an average equal error rate (EER) of 0.86%.