INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Patient IDs Would Improve Healthcare

Creating a unique patient identification number for every person in the United States would help reduce medical errors, simplify the use of electronic medical records, increase overall efficiency, and protect patient privacy, according to a recent RAND Corp. study.

Creating such an ID system could cost as much as $11 billion, but the effort would likely return even more in benefits to the nation’s healthcare system, said researchers from RAND Health, a nonprofit research organization.

As adoption of health IT expands nationally and more patient records are computerized, there have been increasing calls to create a system that would make it easier to retrieve records across varying systems such as those used by doctors and hospitals. Federal legislation passed more than a decade ago supported the creation of a unique patient identifier system, but privacy and security concerns have stalled efforts to implement it.

RAND researchers examined the costs of creating a unique patient ID system, compared the error rates of such a system and its alternatives, and examined the operational advantages and disadvantages.

The study concluded that one of the primary benefits created by broad adoption of unique patient identifiers would be to eliminate record errors and reduce repetitive and unnecessary care.

Instead of unique patient identifiers, most health systems currently use a technique known as statistical matching that retrieves a patient’s medical record by searching for attributes such as name, birth date, address, gender, medical record numbers, and all or part of the patient’s Social Security number (SSN).

RAND researchers estimated that this method returns incomplete medical records about 8% of the time and exposes patients to privacy risks.

There are privacy concerns surrounding the use of a patient ID system, but the RAND study concluded that many of those concerns could be addressed through the creation and enforcement of laws that severely punish those who misuse information retrieved with a health ID number. Also, the RAND study concluded that SSNs should not be used as a medical identifier.

A genuine unique patient identification system would be more secure because it could include safeguards such as check codes that allow numbers to be easily screened for input errors. Such codes are mathematical combinations of the other digits in the number and are commonly used in other digital IDs such as those in the product barcodes scanned in retail stores.

From January - February 2009