The Quest for a Fail-Safe Patient Identification Solution in the U.S.

A recent article on the challenges posed by mistakes in patient identification was rather pessimistic about the amount of progress that has been made in the field (see:Fail-safe patient ID matching remains just out of reach patient-id). This boils down to the challenge of ensuring that the EHR record of"Mary Smith" who is admitted today is uncorrupted by data from a different"Mary Smith" who was admitted to the hospital yesterday. Below is an excerpt from the article. It's long so read the whole thing if you are interested.[D]igital technologies —electronic health records in particular—have greatly exacerbated the challenge of ensuring that clinicians not only accurately identify patients but match them to their medical records. There's a lot more data flowing around and between health systems now than ever before. At a time when healthcare organizations are looking for every advantage to cut costs while improving quality and safety, patient matching is a challenge that can cause problems on a lot of levels.When a hospital has a patient's correct health record, it not only provides better care but it can cut down on the costly inefficiency of having multiple records for one patient or a single — erroneous—record for one patient. Estimates of patient-matching accuracy vary, but most say that it hovers around 90%. The problems posed by the remaining 10% are costly, both in terms of safety and money....[H]ealth systems are searching ...
Source: Lab Soft News - Category: Laboratory Medicine Authors: Tags: Computer Security Electronic Health Record (EHR) Healthcare Information Technology Healthcare Innovations Medical Research Quality of Care Source Type: blogs