Several health care organizations recently mailed a letter urging House appropriators to further legislative report language that would eliminate barriers that inhibit solutions for matching patients to their medical records.
To better match patients, the letter asks that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have more interactions with the private sector. Through this collaboration, patients could receive more accurate matching with their proper medical records when they need care.
“We’ve made great progress in digitizing the nation’s health care system,” Russell Branzell, CHIME president and CEO, said. “But if we are going to improve patient safety and care from one provider setting to another, we must be able to ensure with 100 percent accuracy that we properly identify patients and match them to their records and not a different John Doe. The report language is a recognition that patients deserve to know that the information in their electronic health record (EHR) belongs to them and that it contains all relevant information necessary for informed clinical decision making.”
When patients are matched with the wrong records, major medical errors occur, which cost people health and funds.
“In a system that provides care to over 300 million Americans and handles billions of data transactions annually, no health care task is more important than matching patients with their correct health information,” Healthcare Leadership Council President Mary Grealy said. “Public-private cooperation in carrying out a national strategy for accurately identifying patients will strengthen our health care system’s safety, quality and cost-efficiency.”
