As we move toward an interoperable health system featuring widespread use of electronic medical records and electronic exchange of healthcare information among organizations, patients, and caregivers, it becomes increasingly important yet complex to ensure the accuracy of each person’s identity and reduce the frequency of identity errors in matching patient records. There are currently a number of issues in patient matching that must be addressed to protect patient safety, improve population health, and lower costs through care coordination:
• Multiplicity of different patient matching approaches/algorithms used by different developers and Health Information Exchange (HIE) organizations and thus lack of uniformity in patient matching methods across the healthcare industry.
• Insufficient evaluation of the accuracy of these diverse methods, especially in real-world use; thus, there is no gold standard for patient matching.
• High rates of unmatched and mismatched records, due in part to inadequate data quality in health systems, resulting in duplicate or mismatched records within a system.
• Lack of national data standards for validation of data quality for patient matching.

Read More >>