Amazon’s biometric palm prints and vein imagery scanning technology incorporated into its Amazon One payments system has for the first expanded into the healthcare sector, with a mass-scale deployment in the NYU Langone Health system.
The use of Amazon One for patient check-ins is at this point optional in the initial six hospitals and more than 320 outpatient centers run by NYU Langone in New York.
The deal is considered to be landmark, given that it is the largest deployment of Amazon One yet in a single industry – and this will only expand during 2025 to other NYU Langone facilities.
The provider reports a total of over 10 million patient visits each year.
NYU Langone gives the same reasons for using biometric identification technology as others – like airports and large venues – and it boils down to convenience.
Reducing wait times (from two or three to less than one minute, according to NYU Langone), streamlining check-in process, and “easing” administrative workload for staff are some of the reason cited by the healthcare provider.
But surrendering highly sensitive biometric data for that type of benefit was and remains controversial, and critics say very bad trade-off.
Possible privacy violations top the list of concerns, and from there on, the possibility that these huge datasets could be used to fuel mass surveillance at some point.
It doesn’t help that Amazon’s biometric tools have been causing such concerns in the past and that the giant is now moving strongly into the healthcare, of all industries.
To address this, NYU Langone stresses that Amazon will “only” have access to their patients’ palm prints, while health and personal data will not be included. Given the purpose of using Amazon One, the provider’s assurances read like answering a question that no one asked.
However, many patients, and observers, are likely to wonder if the biometric data harvested in this way will be encrypted, which NYU Langone says will be the case, patients will also be able to ask for their data to be deleted, and, have the option of opting out once they opt-in.
