Findings

Congress finds the following: (1) Ensuring accurate patient identification and matching is key to achieving the interoperability within the health care system called for by Congress in the 21st Century Cures Act and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act. (2) There is currently no national strategy to ensure patients are accurately matched with their medical records. (3) There is no standard definition across the health care system of patient match rate to ensure the ability to accurately measure patient matches and patient misidentification. (4) The patient match rates that are available can vary widely, with an estimate from CHIME noting that matching within facilities can be as low as 80 percent—meaning that one out of every five patients may not be matched to all his or her records. (5) Patient misidentification within the United States health care system is a threat to patient safety, patient privacy, and a driver of unnecessary costs to patients and providers. (6) The inability of clinicians to ensure patients are accurately matched with their medical record has caused medical errors, and even lives lost. Patient misidentification has been named a recurrent patient safety challenge in multiple years by ECRI. (7) Patients must undergo unnecessary repeated medical tests because of the inability to ensure accurate matches to their medical record. (8) The expense of repeated medical care due to duplicate records costs an average of $1,950 per patient inpatient stay, and more than $1,700 per emergency department visit. Thirty-five percent of all denied claims result from inaccurate patient identification, costing the average hospital $2.5 million and the United States health care system more than $6.7 billion annually. (9) Overlaid records, caused by merging multiple patients’ data into one medical record, may result in unauthorized disclosures under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), as well as the risk of a patient receiving treatment for another patient’s condition. (10) This Act would decrease the prevalence of patient misidentification by further promoting interoperability, thereby protecting patients and addressing high costs driven by this issue.