Matching patients to their medical records from multiple healthcare providers is critical to medical care, but this can be challenging due to incomplete and inaccurate records. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) www.ahrq.gov has awarded a five year $1.7 million grant to Regenstrief Institute’s Center for Biomedical Informatics (CBMI) located in Indiana, to support the development and testing of automated patient identification approaches.
CBMI Director Dr. Shaun Grannis MD, PI for the new grant reports, “Recommendations on how to solve the patient identification problem has been proposed in the past but they haven’t been backed up by evidence. The AHRQ grant will provide real world evidence-based guidelines for optimizing patient matching.”
Using the resources available from the “Indiana Network for Patient Care” (INPC), Regenstrief investigators will evaluate newly developed algorithms and make recommendations about how to standardize and improve the quality of the underlying patient identifying information. The software developed will be open source and available to everyone.
CBMI has more than 15 years’ experience in patient record matching while utilizing the INPC. The INPC developed by CBMI is now operated by the Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE) https://www.ihs.gov/hie.
Dr. Grannis said, “Our work will help EMR systems more accurately being together a patient’s information. Ensuring more accurate patient identification helps to reduce the number of preventable medical errors.”