How to create UIN for Health Insurance Records

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Challenges:

1.UIN should be free from various ways names can be written. Typical problems in names are:

  • Using Abbreviations of names
  • Using Middle name or Fathers Name
  • Difficult names are often wrongly typed
  • Full change of names which are informed.
  • Change in Spelling because of translation from one language to another.
  • Name Modifications which may not be informed like adding an alphabet because it is spiritually better.

2. Missing Information: People often don’t fill vital information in the given forms because of various reasons. Some of the vital information may include:

  • Address
  • Date of Birth
  • Parents Name etc.

3. Validation of Information: Information captured in forms is usually not a validated one which results in creating ‘false’ UIN.

4. Linking: UIN should be linked to an individual and not Policy

5. Software Issues: Various softwares capture information in various formats which may be different than information actually captured at the field level.

  • Due to this changing of formats manually or mechanically may corrupt the data.
  • Also, vital information like date of birth can be written in various formats like American; British and may be short form or long form for year.
  • Changing of softwares is usually happens with passage of time but every time some information gets lost because either softwares are not 100% compatible or all scenarios are not humanly possible to check while migrating the information from one system to another.

6. Issued Documents: Various issues documents like PAN cards, Voter Card, Ration Card, Driver’s License have various complication of their own:

  • Everyone does not have same card
  • Format of these cards change from state to state.
  • People tend to avoid these cards until unless these are mandatory requirements for government’s process.
  • Cards are neither mandatory nor applicable to whole of population.

7. Indian Conditions: It becomes more challenging in India, where

  • Levels of Literacy are still very low and people can’t read or write,
  • Languages differs every 500 kms.
  • People are not aware of importance of some specific document like voter card etc even if it is issued. They are least likely to keep it in safe custody.Further, misrepresentation or misuse of UIN for ‘false’ claims is very great where poverty levels are high.People may not remember the cryptic code when required.
  • In case of natural calamity like fire or floods where all proofs / documents gets destroyed it is impossible for anyone to provide the number at the time of need.

8. Various Combinations: Combinations of various parameters which are in turn dependent on information provided by users themselves can be highly incorrect.

9. Scale of Numbering system should be such that it should not run out digits and later on no. of digits are increased like phone numbers getting increased from 6 digit to 8 digits.

Problem at hand:

There are 3 types of organizations which require this number:

  1. An Individual
  2. Medical Care Provider
  3. Insurer

At each stage there is different level of complexity to capture and validate the information.

  1. At an Individual level: Problems may be that of language, writing, genuinity.
  2. Insurer Level: Problems of validating the genuineness of the person i.e., whether person is still alive or not. Also, processing of hundreds of records in a day should not be cumbersome. Also, most Insurers are using BPOs, security of data is very crucial.
  3. Medical Care Level: Speed and retrieval of records without any other reference. Doctor on the move should be able to pull medical records with a simple number from his PDA/Smartphone.

Solution lies in 3 stages:

At Individual Level: While making the application, it should be mandatory for the applicant who is a natural person to provide bio-metric impressions of the left thumb, left index finger, right thumb and right index finger which can be photographed electronically on the system of the Designated Service Provider. Practically this is simple to capture i.e., taking finger impression on the form and scanning it.

At Medical Care / Doctor Level: Where speed is the essence and individual is physically present. This becomes very fast and easy to retrieve the information even in the case of accident and person is brought to hospital in an unconscious state. Simply by taking his finger print and matching it with Insurer’s records will bring up his Personal Health information and Insurance records.

This system takes the clue from IP address used to identify every machine on the internet. There are 4.3 billion possible combinations which can be created from this combination number. This far exceeds Indian Population for many centuries to come.

A typical IP address looks like this: 216.27.61.137. To make it easier for us humans to remember, IP addresses are normally expressed in decimal format as a “dotted decimal number” like the one above. But computers communicate in binary form. Look at the same IP address in binary: 11011000.00011011.00111101.10001001

The four numbers in an IP address are called octets, because they each have eight positions when viewed in binary form. If you add all the positions together, you get 32, which is why IP addresses are considered 32-bit numbers. Since each of the eight positions can have two different states (1 or 0) the total number of possible combinations per octet is 28 or 256. So each octet can contain any value between 0 and 255. Combine the four octets and you get 232 or a possible 4,294,967,296 unique values!

At Insurer Level: Where applicant is not present physically but only documents needs to be processed. This can be produced with above Octate number and translated to fetch the required report.

Salient Features of 3 Level UIN

  1. There is no manual intervention in writing / typing / translating the number. Number can not be tampered with.
  2. Each Level / Organization has its own system of codification, so it can not be passed on from one level to another by word of mouth.
  3. Finger Print can not be misused after the death of the person especially for claim purpose.
  4. This system is not dependent on any other card like PAN card, Ration Card etc.
  5. This system is fool proof of language, literacy levels, can not be manipulated etc.
  6. System is software migration proof since basic finger impression will be an image which can not misinterpreted by any software.