Duplicate electronic medical records are an increasingly common and costly problem in the healthcare industry, according to an infographic compiled by M2SYS.
Between 8 and 12 percent of a hospital’s EMRs are duplicates, the vast majority (92 percent) created during inpatient admissions, according to the infographic. The highest instances of duplicate records are found among pediatric patients, who lack official forms of identification.
The average immediate cost of a duplicate EMR pair is $50, according to the infographic. The cost is much higher when accounting for extra personnel required to “cleanse” EMR systems (the average healthcare organization has two such dedicated employees) and the cost of duplicated tests or treatment delays (a study at Children’s Medical Center in Dallas found this average cost to be $1,099).
To help combat the issue, 64.8 percent of hospitals use some type of unique patient identifier, 50.8 percent use probabilistic algorithms to match patient data, 34.4 percent use deterministic matching and 5.5 percent use biometric matching.
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