Sequoia Project establishing new patient identity matching workgroup

The Sequoia Project which operates the eHealth Exchange, a national health information network, is calling on industry stakeholders along with policy and technical professionals to merge with a new workgroup to seek ways to improve and better standardize patient identity matching without utilizing a national patient identification number.

A patient identity matching framework is composed of a set of resources and reference materials, involving substantial demographic data, to enable a provider agency to rightly recognize its sufferers and to match those sufferers when they get treated at other provider agencies, explains Mariann Yeager, CEO of Sequoia. It can be done in healthcare, she asserts, adding that, “Financial institutions have been doing this for years.”

But in healthcare, worst data quality leads to matching mistakes, further hampered by varying ways of formatting the data. “It boils down to the registration procedure and checking to make certain a patient already has a record,” Yeager points out.

The aim of the patient identity matching workgroup will be to develop common problems that relate to suitable patient matching, and rules to be consistently applied, she further adds. Healthcare continues to be an industry of separate agencies each working within their own silo, which further exacerbates appropriate and precise patient matching. Most organizations identify sufferers inside their enterprise but do not think about the other provider down the road.

Subsequently, Sequoia seeks 9 to 12 workgroup members that need to achieve a standardized way to identify sufferers across the industry by using existing technologies that can support 95% of the work. This, although, will rely on agencies providing adequate resources for the job and management commitment, Yeager claims. “You require someone responsible for making it happen with resources available.”

A report, which involves a comprehensive explanation of the need to develop minimally acceptable practices for patient matching, is available here. Individuals interested in joining the workgroup can get an application by emailing admin@sequoiaproject.org.