Groups urge Congress to take action on patient identifier as COVID-19 raises the stakes
Fierce Health Payers July 8, 2020
Patient identity and matching problems are not new to healthcare. But the COVID-19 pandemic has raised the stakes, healthcare leaders say.
The failure to accurately identify patients to their data raises patient safety and quality of care concerns, such as the wrong lab results being attached to a patient’s record or patients receiving the wrong medication.
In the current health crisis, mismatched patient records can also hamper public health efforts to respond to the coronavirus and address health inequities.
“COVID-19 highlights the importance of health IT and data and it’s more important than ever to solve our country’s patient misidentification problem,” said Wylecia Wiggs Harris, M.D., CEO of the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), speaking Tuesday during a virtual...