A Biometric Enrollment Platform Built for Zero Duplicate Identity

Project overview

UNC’s Malawi research hub operates without access to formal national ID infrastructure. This absence created a serious data integrity risk across every active clinical trial. 

Patients were being enrolled multiple times, sometimes across different studies, sometimes across repeat visits to the same one. The consequences extended beyond inconvenience: compromised research data, duplicate compensation payments, and compliance gaps with international research sponsors. Manual tracking had already proven error-prone, and off-the-shelf tools tried previously were too rigid for this environment. UNC needed a purpose-built system capable of working reliably at scale, across multiple stakeholder types, in a genuinely low-infrastructure setting. SHALIGRAM was brought in to architect that system from the ground up. 

The result was a full biometric screening platform built specifically for this context. It now anchors data integrity across UNC’s international research operations. 

Technical challenges

In the absence of national identification infrastructure, UNC faced a data integrity challenge with direct financial and scientific implications. Any proposed solution required proven capability at clinical scale. 

• Patients lacked standardized national IDs, passports, or driver’s licenses to verify identity reliably. 
• Duplicate enrolments across studies and visits compromised the validity of active clinical trial data. 
• Duplicate compensation payments were being issued to the same patients repeatedly and unknowingly. 
• Manual visit tracking was inherently error-prone and could not scale to 5,000 monthly patients. 
• Previously tried off-the-shelf tools proved too rigid and unreliable for this specific research context. 
• The platform needed distinct access levels for screeners, auditors, data managers, and super admins.