Have you ever received a reminder call for someone who wasn’t you? Or two people stood up in the waiting room at your doctor’s office because they were both named Bob, when the medical assistant called the first name? When a patient presents to a healthcare facility, he or she will be registered by the facility and medical history will be requested from other providers. This is the first point of entry where data must be precise, or the integrity will be disrupted on down the line.
How do you know that you have the right patient? Most staff verifying patient identity are notably underpaid and the positions turn over frequently, making adequate training and standardization of operations very difficult. Not to mention, they are typically in very busy environments where they are pressed to find a patient record quickly. As an example, there are 2,638 Susan Clarks in the U.S. And that doesn’t even include close cousin names of Susie, Suzanne, etc. It is far too common to select a wrong patient or create a new one. The danger therein can affect patient safety when medication history and allergies are not correctly identified. Larger health systems have entire teams of people dedicated to untangling mismatched or duplicate records. Estimates on the cost of addressing these issues is estimated at $60-100 per record depending on level of complexity. That is a cost of healthcare few know exists.
Then consider the amount of documentation that can occur for one patient in one episode, or even one emergency room visit. If that facility participates in a health information exchange or simply faxes a report to another treating provider once the patient was registered on a wrong account, this incorrect clinical information is now being delivered to other organizations with virtually no ability to retrieve it or mark it as erroneous. This history now follows that patient.
Similar to this challenge as described above, if an incorrect person is associated within a Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP), required by multiple states for reporting controlled substance prescriptions, the adverse outcome potential would again raise the patient safety issue of having incorrect, or missed, medications on a patient’s medication list leading to the writing of an inappropriate prescription. Additionally, if a patient was incorrectly associated on the PDMP as a person who has received multiple controlled substance prescriptions from more than one provider, there is a reputational implication. How would you feel if you happened to catch a glimpse of your record on the provider’s computer screen that has a big alert message that says, “Drug Seeker”, when you had only ever been prescribed narcotics that one time you broke your arm ice skating and had only taken two and the rest of the bottle sits expiring in your medicine cabinet??
We all love to analyze data and statistics. But the data is meaningless if it is not accurate. And we have to remember at the source of the numbers is a human, potentially suffering from any number of conditions. Advocating for innovative solutions to improve patient matching is our small way of contributing to improving healthcare. What is yours?
