Solving the Patient ID Now Puzzle

Executive summary

Patient matching – the process of accurately linking each individual patient to their medical information – has been an ongoing challenge for healthcare. Despite decades of effort, the process is subject to error, time-consuming, and resource intensive. The recently published patient matching framework by the Patient ID Now coalition1 states that “Eliminating matching errors is the primary goal of a national strategy around patient identification and matching.” The framework document represents the consensus of 27 U.S. healthcare organizations concerning more than 50 properties that are necessary to achieve a successful United States healthcare matching capability. Note that the primary goal is not just to make patient identification and matching incrementally more accurate; it is to eliminate errors in patient identification.

Global Patient Identifiers, Inc. has developed a patient identification solution that meets this critical goal. We strongly support the efforts of the Patient ID Now coalition to repeal the federal unique identifier prohibition but go much further by supporting a specific solution that meets all the requirements in the Patient ID Now framework including privacy, security, and the ability to fully recover from “errors” such as identity theft and data breaches.