Problems with Duplicate Sufferer Records Hound HIM Experts

An analysis of 815 health data management experts finds more than half daily work on mitigating possible duplicate sufferer records within their agencies

In the survey conducted by the American Health Information Management Association, 57% of respondents do this work daily with approximately 3-quarters of them doing so at least weekly, while attempting to have sufficient resources to ensure precise matching of sufferers.

Alternatively, AHIMA calls for an industrywide attempt to find solutions. “Making better sufferer matching attempts is a challenge we can meet,” CEO Lynne Thomas Gordon stated in a statement. “The healthcare community must come together to accept it so that correct patient data is present when and where it is required.”

The quest to make better sufferer matching affects such major healthcare initiatives as patient-centric care, health information exchange, population health management, data analytics, and finance problems that involve value-based purchasing, risk-based compensation and accountable care organizations, in accordance to the association.

Additional survey results demonstrate:

* 43% are measuring data quality regarded to sufferer matching;

* Less than half of the people or respondents have a quality assurance step in their registration or post-registration procedure;

* 55% know the duplicate medical record amount but there is no standard for measuring the rate; and

* The top 5 issues of managing the MPI/EMPI are: registration staff turnover, record matching/sufferer search terminology and/or algorithms, deficiency of resources to correct duplicates, inadequate data governance policy support and deficieny of executive support.