Biometric Based Electronic Health Record and Patient Identification System for Improved Healthcare Delivery in Nigeria

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@article{1715456,
      author = {Ayoola Sunday Ekundayo},
      title = {Biometric Based Electronic Health Record and Patient Identification System for Improved Healthcare Delivery in Nigeria},
      journal = {Iconic Research And Engineering Journals},
      year = {2026},
      volume = {9},
      number = {9},
      pages = {3498-3507},
      issn = {2456-8880},
      url = {https://www.irejournals.com/formatedpaper/1715456.pdf},
      abstract = {Accurate patient identification is critical to patient safety and effective healthcare delivery. In many developing countries, including Nigeria, healthcare institutions continue to rely on manual patient identification systems that are prone to errors, record duplication, and delays in accessing medical information. These challenges undermine the effectiveness of electronic health record (EHR) systems and compromise quality of care. This study designed, implemented, and evaluated a facial biometric–based electronic health record and patient identification system as a secure, contactless, and scalable solution for Nigerian healthcare settings. An experimental research design was adopted. Facial images were collected from 50 patients at a Nigerian tertiary healthcare institution, with three facial samples per participant, resulting in a dataset of 150 images. The system was developed using Java, OpenCV, and a MySQL database. Performance evaluation was conducted using standard biometric metrics, including face detection accuracy, face recognition accuracy, false acceptance rate (FAR), false rejection rate (FRR), and average system response time.The developed system achieved a face detection accuracy of 98.67% and a face recognition accuracy of 94.67%. Both FAR and FRR were recorded at 2.67%, while the average response time was 1.82 seconds. These findings demonstrate that facial recognition technology can effectively support real-time patient identification and electronic health record retrieval in clinical environments. The study concludes that facial biometric-based EHR systems can significantly enhance patient safety, reduce record duplication, and improve healthcare efficiency in low-resource settings. Future work should explore multi-modal biometric integration, large-scale deployment, and robust data privacy frameworks.},
      keywords = {Facial recognition; Biometrics; Electronic health records; Patient identification; Health informatics; Nigeria},
      month = {March},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.64388/IREV9I9-1715456}
  }