Patient Identification Deficiencies Plague Quality of Care

Before receiving care at a medical facility – before even seeing a doctor or a nurse – every patient has to go through the simple registration process.

But that seemingly simple process is rife with complications that can linger throughout every step of a patient’s stay, creating the potential for inefficient care, unnecessary tests, and serious medical errors.

The implementation of electronic health records (EHR) across the industry has exacerbated these concerns. According to a survey published by the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) in January, over half of health information management professionals routinely work on condensing duplicate patient records, and nearly three-quarters of those respondents devote time to duplicate records on a weekly basis.

However, patient identification issues are still largely unrecognized. According to the survey, just 43% of hospitals are measuring patient matching data quality, and 47% have a quality assurance step in their registration process or post-registration process.

Patient misidentification can lead to significant patient harm that ranges from serious to mundane. Medication errors can occur if a physician enters the wrong order in the EHR or the nurse fails to properly identify the right patient. Patients might undergo an unnecessary x-ray or MRI that failed to show up in their record.

“There’s so much that can go wrong, but I don’t think we have a clear understanding of how often things truly do go wrong, or how many times we’re just fortunate there’s not a bad outcome,” says Lesley Kadlec, MA, RHIA, director of HIM Practice Excellence at AHIMA in Chicago.

In 2012, a survey conducted by the College of Healthcare Information Executives (CHIME) found that approximately 20% of health IT professionals could trace at least one adverse event to patient misidentification.

“That was a small sample size,” says Matthew Weinstock, director of communications and public relations at CHIME. “If you extrapolate that out, we think the implications from a safety perspective are much larger.”

This is an excerpt from Patient Safety Monitor Journal. Subscribers can read the full article here. Find out more about the journal, it’s benefits, and how to subscribe by clicking here.