Healthcare Organizations Advocate for Nationwide Strategy to Address Patient Identification to Improve Patient Care, Reduce Costs
LexisNexis® Risk Solutions has joined Patient ID Now coalition to support accurate patient identification and ensure that patients are accurately matched to their health information across care settings and platforms.
Patient ID Now is a coalition of healthcare organizations representing a wide range of stakeholders committed to advancing through legislation and regulations a nationwide strategy to address patient identification. The Patient ID Now coalition seeks to remove section 510 from the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill, allowing HHS to work with the private sector to develop a nationwide patient identification strategy – including adoption of a Unique Patient Identifier – to improve patient care. The founding members of the Patient ID coalition are the American College of Surgeons, AHIMA, CHIME, HIMSS, Intermountain Healthcare, and Premier.
Through LexisNexis® LexID® for Healthcare, LexisNexis Risk Solutions uses automated matching to assign unique identifiers to patient records to link together records for the same patient – allowing healthcare organizations to reduce duplication of records and increase interoperability among disparate EHR and other healthcare systems. LexisNexis Risk Solutions partners with healthcare organizations to cleanse and match patient records to ensure safe patient care and smooth workflow, helping combat the industry’s interoperability challenges.
A lack of widespread operational principles as well as limitations in processes – such as human error and demographic changes – result in inaccurate patient identification. As more data is generated and shared, duplicate patient records and mismatches result in multiple challenges for the healthcare industry. From a safety perspective, patients can receive incorrect diagnoses, treatments, or prescriptions when their healthcare information is spread across multiple files, or misfiled in the wrong record. From a workflow perspective, providers are muddling their way through often incomplete or incorrect patient records, leading to compromised decision-making and wasted resources.
Furthermore, data integrity is essential as the healthcare industry continues to move toward value-based care because it is foundational to enabling preventive strategies, social determinants of health (SDOH) applications, and population health management. Sharing patient information – the right information – across healthcare organizations serving the patient hinges on having a correct and complete patient record for each patient, which will protect patient safety, reduce costs, increase program efficiency, help prevent fraud, and ensure better patient experience. It also means that when a patient requests their own record, they will have more confidence that their healthcare provider is maintaining a complete view of their medical history.
LexisNexis Risk Solutions is proud to be a member of Patient ID Now coalition and supports its mission to develop a nationwide strategy to address patient identification. For more information about Patient ID Now coalition, visit https://patientidnow.org. To learn more about LexisNexis LexID for Healthcare, visit https://risk.lexisnexis.com/products/lexid-for-healthcare.
