The issue is on the radar of Congress. In a recent letter to the Government Accountability Office, several sitting U.S. senators cited patient matching as an essential strategy to reduce risk of harm to patients. Why wait for Congress to legislate a convoluted solution to this very real problem? The hospital’s data stewards must act now to assure the right patient data is going to the right patient record.
4. In the absence of a national patient ID, how are patient identities verified? In addition to the patient safety issue, modern problems, such as our growing opioid abuse epidemic, especially call for a unique patient identifier. This would substantially curtail the ability to prescription shop, as it would make it more difficult to change identities. It’s still unlikely the federal government will be entrusted with assigning unique patient IDs, but commercially developed, master patient index technology is already available.
Not all solutions are equal, however. Conventional patient matching technology processes patient identities in “batches”, which simply can’t scale for large data homes. And even some newer solutions that use referential matching are slow at matching identities in large-scale settings, plus they typically only use current patient data to match.
As such, the chief attributes to look for in a master patient index solution are: enterprise scalability; real-time matching; and additional use of historical data when matching patient identities, including data that goes as far back as old college addresses and decades-old medical records. Only then can hospitals achieve a near perfect matching rate.
No doubt, these are all complex questions to address. But doing so now will position providers to be data stewards the public can trust.
About the author: Dr. Oleg Bess, is founder and CEO of 4medica, the clinical data exchange company. With a quarter century of healthcare experience, Dr. Bess has spent the last 13 years honing his development and leadership expertise in informatics while maintaining his 20-year-old OB/GYN practice in Los Angeles. A board certified OB/GYN physician, he is a nationally recognized gynecological and laparoscopic surgeon, as well as a committed philanthropist.
Back to HCB News
