CHIME Offers $1 Million Reward For Creation Of National Patient ID

By Megan Williams, contributing writer

An enormous amount of resources in healthcare and healthcare IT are dedicated to medical error reduction. After all, mistakes in healthcare cost lives.

To help address that problem, the College Of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) has launched a challenge with an award of $1 million, designed to help encourage the creation of a national patient ID.

CHIME CEO and President Russell P. Branzell explains, “There is a growing consensus among payers and providers that a unique patient ID would radically reduce medical errors and save lives. Incomplete or duplicate health records present significant issues in terms of patient safety, and there is a pressing need for preventing, detecting and removing inaccurate records so hospitals can positively match the right data with the right patient in order to provide the best possible care.”

An Old Idea

As cited by MedCity News, the idea of a national patient ID isn’t new, but recent criminal activity in the industry has brought it back to the forefront of discussions around security. Right now, healthcare still relies on social security numbers as a primary means of patient identification, making patient records all the more valuable to criminals.

Additionally, duplicate and inaccurate patient records that stem from shared patient names and human error still plague the industry.

CHIME presents the example of the Harris County Hospital district in Houston, which has over 2,000 patients by the name of Maria Garcia — 231 of those patients share the same date of birth.

Leadership’s Perspective

The college surveyed member CIOs in 2012, and found an error rate of more than 8 percent — and up to 20 percent — due to patient mismatching. Additionally, of the 128 respondents, 19 percent indicated that their facility had, in the last year, experienced an “adverse event” because of mismatched patient information.

According to CHIME Board Chair Charles E. Christian, FCHIME, LCHIME, CHCIO, Vice President and CIO of St. Francis Hospital in Georgia, “This needs to be the year of positive patient identification. Healthcare CIOs have long struggled with a lack of national standards for eradicating the burdens of matching patient data when engaging in health information exchange.”

CHIME is currently working to raise the prize money, and in the meantime, has assembled a task force of leaders in healthcare IT to establish challenge guidelines and criteria for winning.