1. A system for positively identifying a patient, comprising: an eye illumination source; a sensor that can detect data relating to the patient's eye; an optical system for transferring the patient's eye data to the sensor; means for capturing the data from the sensor connected to the system; means for analyzing the captured data; an information storage/retrieval component connected to the system having stored therein a plurality of historical Iris Feature Vectors (IFVs) representing identification indicia of a plurality of patients; and a contemporaneous IFV representing an identification indicia of a particular patient generated by the system; wherein the analyzing means is suitably programmed for comparing the contemporaneous IFV to the plurality of stored, historical IFVs, and determining a similarity relationship between the contemporaneous IFV and the historical IFVs.