Congress has discouraged HHS from developing a national patient identifier, according to GovInfoSecurity.com. However, to promote interoperability, legislators and advocacy groups have recently been pursuing new ways to connect patients to the correct data across disparate systems.
A provision of the House Committee on Appropriations’ proposed budget requests HHS complete a report on how patient matching would improve care, reduce costs and decrease errors. It also asks the department to investigate what patient safety improvements hospitals may experience if participation in a patient matching system became a requirement for the Medicare program.
“The committee is aware that a number of patient matching systems are currently being used in the commercial sector, but one has yet to be adopted in Medicare,” the report states. “The committee recognizes that a lack of a patient matching system for Medicare beneficiaries results in duplicate procedures and poses a significant patient safety risk.”
Click here to view the full report.
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