Imagine two patients with the same last name, admitted for separate ailments at the same hospital. One is mistakenly treated with a medication intended for the other patient--and has a serious reaction to the drug. Patient mix-ups are all-too-frequent occurrences at many hospitals across the U.S., leading to redundant tests, wrong diagnoses, incorrect treatment services and unnecessary hospitalizations - while increasing costs.
The ECRI Institute Patient Safety Organization reviewed 7,600 wrong-patient events over a 32-month timeframe - voluntarily reported by 181 health organizations. Of these mix-ups, most were caught early, but 9 percent resulted in death or harm to the patient.
A similar study from the RAND Corporation found that health providers duplicate patient records on average 8 percent of the time. Patient misidentification costs hospitals an average of $17.4 million each year in denied claims. Furthermore, physicians treating the whole patient along a care continuum require more than a snapshot of a visit or sparsely detailed record. They need access to a person's full medical history including diagnoses, medical images, lab results, procedures, family background and medication history. To make on-the-spot decisions for accurate diagnoses and sensible treatment plans, care providers must know the right information about the right patient. Outcomes depend on it.
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Improving Outcomes: A Solution
Mismatches jeopardize patient safety and care outcomes. A national system that assigned a unique patient identifier to each patient would streamline the identification process, reduce errors and cut costs. The ideal system would join medical records from disparate providers and care settings linking all relevant information.
A main, referential database would serve as a safe, accurate and continually updated repository that improved matching technology of patient records. The aggregated data would give patients, hospitals, insurers, physician practices and pharmacies the confidence of seeing the whole picture of the whole patient: the correct patient.
Some government-run national health systems abroad have turned to unique or universal identifiers to solve many of their medical errors challenges. In Great Britain, every patient gets a National Health Service Number. Both Australia and Singapore have implemented their own health ID programs. The U.S., where the incidence of medical identity theft continues to rise, could also benefit from the safety and protection of an identifier system.
About 86 percent of providers have witnessed or have known of a medical error due to misidentification. Are you one of them? For the safety of patients, there needs to be a plan in place to prevent such errors from occurring again.
Source: Health IT Outcomes (View full article)
Posted by Dan Corcoran on November 29, 2017 06:55 AM
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