Healthcare DIVE July 5, 2017
An NPI could help with interoperability but the push toward such a metric faces many challenges such as Congress banning federal funding to develop an NPI and vendors not wishing to share information.
As healthcare becomes more digitalized and networked, issues around data exchange make patient identification an increasing challenge. Without a national patient identifier (NPI), doctors rely on patient’s names and birth dates for identification and something as simple as a middle initial can cast doubt on a patient’s identity, not to mention the myriad identical names stored in EHR systems. Mismatching patients and records can lead to missed diagnoses or treatments.
Patient-matching is also time-consuming. The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) conducted a member survey on the...
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