EHRA calls for national patient data matching strategy

In its response to a Senate committee's call for comments on the availability and utility of healthcare data, the EHR Association (EHRA) has called for a nationwide patient data matching strategy to ensure the accurate, timely and efficient matching of patients with their healthcare data across different systems and settings of care.

In an Aug. 12 letter to the Senate Finance Committee, EHRA said "it is widely recognized that the inconsistencies in various state and federal privacy laws as they pertain to sensitive health information...continue to be obstacles to widespread [health information exchange]." And, a nationwide patient data matching strategy remains “one of the most critical unresolved issues in the safe and secure electronic exchange of health information.”

A nationwide patient data matching strategy would “improve patient safety and data interoperability," according to the organization. “Patient identification that ensures accurate patient record matching across provider sites is a primary concern when aggregating patient information from multiple organizations. Error rates in existing technologies that manage patient identification are sufficiently high to cause concern about medical errors, redundant testing and inefficiency.”

The Senate Committee's call for comments is a follow-up to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT's report, “Patient Identification and Matching Final Report,” released in February. That report found that methods of matching patient records have not been adopted uniformly across the industry. Differences in how names and addresses are formatted in various systems, for example, have led to high rates of unmatched records when unaffiliated organizations are participating in health information exchange.

EHRA wrote that "data from many sources should be available to authorized recipients for appropriate purposes, including, as feasible, datasets that link data across multiple systems and patients. We must continue to focus on standardizing common data elements used in health IT to reduce fragmentation in patients' health information and to more effectively support collaborative care delivery and data analytics."

Read the complete letter.