Identity: The missing link to Universal Health Coverage
By Alexandra Grigore, Co-Founder, Simprints
Ahead of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) Day on 12th December, we celebrate the commitment to ensure all people have access to the health services they need, when and where they need them, without financial hardship.
This vision, that no one should be excluded from life-saving care, is a guiding light. Yet, for too many of the world’s most vulnerable people, this vision remains out of reach, often because of a problem that seems deceptively simple: identity.
The invisible barrier to care
Imagine needing a second dose of a vaccine, only to find that your first visit was never properly recorded. This is the reality for millions globally who lack formal, legal identification. When people are invisible to the system, health systems fail to serve them.
An estimated 800 million people worldwide lack official identification. This ‘identity gap’ has cascading effects, creating major inefficiencies in critical public health programs:
- Service gaps: Health workers cannot accurately track which child has received which dose of a vaccine, leading to children falling through the cracks.
- Duplicate records: Patients are often registered multiple times, resulting in duplicate records and distorted coverage data.
- Wasted resources: Governments and donors struggle to verify if essential funds are reaching the intended beneficiaries.
If you can’t measure who you serve, you can’t guarantee Universal Health Coverage.
Bridging the gap with biometrics for good
At Simprints, our mission is to transform the fight against global poverty and disease by ensuring that every public good reaches the people who need it most. We do this by building and deploying cutting-edge biometric technology to solve the identity challenge at the last mile.
Our solution is an open-source biometric ID plugin that allows health workers to create a secure, unique digital ID for a patient, instantly linking them to their complete medical record.
This technology isn’t just about speed, it’s about precision, inclusion, and ethics:
- Inclusion: We design our tools to work for populations often excluded from traditional biometrics, including infants and manual labourers.
- Accuracy: Our biometric look-up has been proven to be dramatically faster and significantly more accurate than manual systems, which is crucial in high-volume settings.
- Privacy: Data security and ethical consent are at our core.
The foundation for UHC
Our work, alongside partners such as Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, is actively laying the foundation for UHC.
When health workers can identify patients accurately and instantly, the results are transformative:
- Verified Coverage: We help track essential services, like routine immunizations.
- Improved Efficiency: In Ethiopia, integrating biometrics reduced duplicate records from 27.8% to just 7.2%, making follow-up care reliable.
- Stronger Systems: By providing clean, verified data, we empower governments to make better, evidence-based policy decisions.
On this UHC Day, let us commit not just to providing health services, but to building the digital infrastructure required to guarantee that every vaccine, every medicine, and every public good reaches the unique individual who needs it. We are proud to be building the technology that makes UHC truly universal.
Read more
- Understand more about our mission and values
- Learn about our impact in 2024
- Delve into our evidence base
