ECRI Institute's multi-stakeholder collaborative the Partnership for Health IT Patient Safety released a toolkit focused on safe practice recommendations when using health IT in patient identification.
The toolkit, Health IT Safe Practices: Toolkit for the Safe Use of Health IT for Patient Identification, features eight safe practice recommendations, along with resources to facilitate the implementation of these practices. The practice recommendations address both the information-gathering aspects of patient identification as well as new technologies to improve identification and ways to leverage existing technologies.
The recommendations include using a confirmation process to help match the patient and the documentation as well as implementing monitoring systems to readily detect identification errors.
"I hope the toolkit will stimulate discussions about safe practices for the use of technology in patient identification, help facilitate implementation of the safe practices and build a foundation for additional work in this area," said ECRI Institute's Lorraine Possanza, DPM, JD.