By Sarianne Gruber
Twitter: @subtleimpact
The prize is $1 million dollars. The challenge is a 100% accurate universal Patient ID. Designed as a crowd sourcing competition, innovators from around the world are invited to submit a solution. The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), a professional organization for Chief Information Officers and other senior healthcare IT leaders, held a press conference in Washington DC on Tuesday, January 19 to officially launch the competition. Often in today’s healthcare environment—errors due to misidentified or matched patient records are potentially as high as 20 percent of the time largely because there’s no universal way of accurately identifying a patient, regardless of where care is sought. In the past, manual processes could reduce the accuracy gap that existed, but as electronic health records become ubiquitous, the challenge takes on new dimensions. CHIME intends to award one million dollars to winner in February 2017 at the CHIME-HIMSS CIO Forum.
Marc Probst, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Intermountain Healthcare, Salt Lake City; and chair of the CHIME board of trustee, addressed how “healthcare faces some immense challenges”. He contends that “as we digitize healthcare and patients move from one care setting to another, we need to ensure with 100 percent accuracy that we identify the right patient at the right time. Anything less than that increases the risk of a medical error and can add unnecessary costs to the healthcare system.” Probst noted that Intermountain Healthcare spends between $4 million and $5 million annually on technologies and processes to try to ensure proper patient identification. At the Mayo Clinic, each case of misidentification costs at least $1,200, according to the Office of the National Coordinator’s 2014 report, “Patient Identification and Matching: Final Report.
The ONC reported that healthcare organizations have made strides in improving patient identification and matching, but those solutions have not been universally adopted. For instance, providers vary greatly in how they format names and addresses. Also, the quality of the data entered into systems can be mixed. CHIME data show that hospitals differ in how they identify patients. More than 60 percent of CHIME members use some form of a unique patient identifier to match patient data within their organizations, others rely on complicated algorithms. Nearly 20 percent of CHIME members surveyed in 2012 could attribute at least one adverse medical event to incorrect patient matching.
“Patient mismatching and our inability to accurately identify patients across the continuum of care has been an ongoing problem for the industry,” said CHIME President and CEO Russell Branzell, FCHIME, CHCIO, indicating that federal law currently prevents the government from spending funds on a national patient identifier. He proclaimed that we and our patients deserve better. He hopes that this competition will bring forth a solution that ensures that we can identify patients the right way every single time. “ If we can achieve that, it will propel us further down the road of being able to effectively and efficiently exchange data between caregivers, improving patient safety and reducing healthcare costs”, he stated with a gesture of optimism.
The National Patient Safety Foundation recognizes patient identification as an important safety issue,” said Tejal K. Gandhi, M.D., MPH, CPPS, president and CEO, NPSF. She gratefully expressed that “we are pleased to see this challenge by CHIME get underway to focus attention on helping find solutions.” CHIME has teamed with HeroX to run the year–long competition. HeroX is a platform where anyone can spur innovation and solve problems by launching a challenge. For more details on CHIME’s National Patient ID Challenge, please visit www.herox.com/PatientIDChallenge.
The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) is an executive organization dedicated to serving chief information officers and other senior healthcare IT leaders. With more than 1,700 CIO members and over 150 healthcare IT vendors and professional services firms, or more information, please visit www.chimecentral.org.