Highlights:
- Congressional leaders are probing the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) about patient matching and how it can improve the COVID-19 response. In a letter to ONC head Don Rucker, MD, which EHRIntelligence obtained via email, Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH), requested more information about what ONC is doing to improve patient matching amid the pandemic.
- Hassan previously recommended the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) utilize the US Postal Service (USPS) address standardization tool to increase patient matching accuracy. The ability to boost these patient matching rates ever so slightly would increase contact tracing and vaccine administration. According to a 2019 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), the integration of this data can increase patient matching by up to 3 percent. Hassan’s letter expressed support for integrating these data sets.
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