Patient matching is vital to patient safety and is, in some cases, a matter of life or death. An exposé by Politico,"Inside America's Covid-reporting breakdown," illustrates why quality leaders like you always keep patient matching top of mind.
According to the Aug. 15 piece, our inability to contain the COVID-19 outbreak was due largely to our inability to do contact tracing. And our inability to do contact tracing was due largely to our inability to match symptomatic people to their COVID test results for accurate, real-time data collection and reporting.
"When the data came in, state employees routinely found errors—instances where a person was counted twice or [where] two people with the same name were identified as a single patient," Politico wrote.
Patient matching has real-world consequences for patient safety—in this case, it is a contributing factor in more than 600,000 deaths from COVID in the U.S. That illustrates why you, as a hospital or health system quality leader, should take it seriously in your daily operations at your organization, and why Medisolv is right beside you to help.
To that end, we're going to look at some new initiatives and research on patient matching and suggest how you can convert that information into practical patient-matching ideas for your quality department.
Data accuracy, quality and standardization in patient identification
Patient ID Now is a coalition of 40 healthcare organizations that advocates for legislation and regulations that support accurate patient identification with their medical records. In April, it released a 14-page Framework for a National Strategy on Patient Identity: A Proposed Blueprint to Improve Patient Identification and Matching. The framework details the coalition's recommendations to improve the accuracy of patient identification across all healthcare settings, including hospitals and health systems like yours. The 43 separate recommendations fall under nine domains:
13 patient matching improvements you can make now
Although the nine domains and 43 recommendations are proposed tenets of statutory and regulatory patient matching solutions, they translate well into practical and actionable patient matching solutions for your hospital or health system.
For example, under the accurate identification and match rates domain, as a quality leader, you can:
Under the data quality domain, as a quality leader, you can:
And under the standardization domain, as a quality leader, you can:
As you can see, you don't have to wait for federal lawmakers or policymakers to codify these ideas in legislation or regulations to make changes in your organization. You can implement them on your own, and you can do so now.
The biometric patient matching option
Another set of practical patient-matching steps you can do yourself right now comes courtesy of a survey of consumers by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
In June and July, Pew asked a nationally representative sample of 1,213 adults age 18 or older about how they feel about sharing and accessing their digital health data. As part of that survey, Pew asked the respondents a number of questions about patient matching.
Overall, 74% of the respondents said they support federal policy changes to set national standards to improve patient matching rates. And 67% said they support spending more federal dollars to improve patient matching.
Perhaps of more interest and practice use to quality leaders like you is how the respondents said they felt about different patient matching solutions. For example:
Overall, 54% of the respondents selected a biometric option (fingerprint scan, eye scan or facial photos) as their first patient matching technology choice.
Patient matching isn’t just a challenge for hospitals
Like the Politico piece mentioned earlier, Pew also connected COVID with the increased need and acceptance of better patient matching capabilities by providers.
"Correct identification of patients across the health care spectrum can ensure that patients, providers, and public health officials receive accurate COVID-19 test results and is a vital component in vaccine distribution," Pew’s researchers wrote.
Again, you don't need federal legislation, regulations or a deadly pandemic to move forward with most of the patient matching solutions identified by Pew in its survey. Other than a national patient identifier, which would require a change in federal law, you can pursue the other four technology ideas today, depending on your resources and health IT platform. And you can do so knowing that patients have your back. Their health depends on it.
Related: Improve the patient matching performance at your hospital or health system with the patient matching tools embedded in Medisolv's quality reporting software platform.
To learn more on this topic, please read "Patient Safety: Don't Let a Case of Mistaken Identity Lead to Tragedy" on medisolv.com.