Thailand integrates biometric ID management into public health ecosystem

The Thai government has opted for a face and iris biometric system as part of efforts to tighten its control on the millions of migrant workers in the country, and to prevent the risk of spreading diseases.

This is a move approved recently by the National Communicable Diseases Committee, The Nation reports.

The country’s Public Health Minister, Somsak Thepsuthin, explained during the committee meeting that around 1.2 million of the 5.2 million migrant workers in the country are undocumented, which makes it difficult for the government to keep track of them, including for purposes of disease control.

To effectively deal with this challenge, the government says the Thai Red Cross Society, in collaboration with the Department of Disease Control and the National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC), has come up with a multimodal biometric system that will henceforth be used to identify, track and manage these foreign workers.

The health minister is quoted as saying that the biometric system will verify the identity of these undocumented migrant workers for public health and humanitarian assistance. It will be integrated into the country’s public health ecosystem, to ensure that the right persons have access to the right medical services, at the right time.

“Personal information will be registered using biometric technology, including facial recognition and iris scanning. This enables authorities to create accurate identity data for public health services, disease surveillance, and control in individuals without identification,” Thepsuthin is quoted as explaining.

The move, the health minister adds, is in line with measures of dealing with challenges which migrant workers in the country have faced over the years trying to access healthcare. Beyond that, he said many of the migrant workers lack official data in the national databases, which makes it difficult to offer them proper care.

In 2023, Thailand trialed an iris biometrics system aimed at setting up a disease control database for undocumented individuals. The project was also a collaboration of the Thai Red Cross Society and the National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC), and had as specific objective to facilitate access to health services on humanitarian terms for individuals without ID cards.

This latest step of biometric identification follows an announcement last year in which the Thai government unveiled a move to issue ID cards to undocumented migrant workers.

The government said at the time that it would issue “Pink Cards” to illegal migrant workers from four countries, namely Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam, according to BNI.

Officials said the new measure concerned illegal migrants as well as those from Myanmar who came to Thailand under a 2018 agreement.