US group calls for national patient IDs

America’s National Alliance for Health Information Technology has called for a national voluntary system of unique patient identification numbers to be established.

Under the proposals, patients would choose to subscribe to the voluntary system, which would assign them a unique ID for them and their medical information.

A voluntary, patient-controlled system of unique identifiers is the only way to ensure acceptable levels of safety and accuracy when exchanging medical information through an electronic national network, argues The National Alliance for Health Information Technology.

The Alliance, an industry grouping advocating adoption of IT and supporting policies to improve the US healthcare system, say current statistical processes for matching patients to their records based on such attributes as name, address and birth date are too unreliable. It believes a national patient ID system would be more secure, accurate and reliable in matching patients with their medical records in distributed networks.

“One of the biggest obstacles to progress in developing an interoperable national health information network remains reaching agreement on how to correctly match medical information to patients while guarding their privacy,” said Scott Wallace, the Alliance’s president and CEO.

Wallace added: “It is time to come to consensus on this issue so we can move forward on a system that will help transform healthcare in America.”

The Alliance has been focusing on the issue of patient identification for three years, including holding forums, reviewing research and gathering input from a range of experts, including some of its members.

“Outside of carefully controlled pilots, accuracy for the current process is roughly 90 percent, based on our collective experience and industry estimates,” says Tom Doyle, vice president and chief architect for HCA and a member of the Alliance’s Technology Leadership Committee. He said this margin of error would increase when applied to larger populations.

The Alliance says voluntary unique identifiers offer the potential to put control in the hands of the patients. “We believe it is in the best interests of consumers to be able to collect, track and manage their personal information,” says Michael Kappel, senior vice president, government strategy and relations for McKesson provider technologies, and chair of the Alliance’s policy committee.

Kappel added: “Unique identifiers can help make this effort more comprehensive and reliable while allowing people to decide who else has access to their health records without worrying about incomplete information or identification mix-ups.”

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 called for the Department of Health and Human Services to issue unique ID numbers for Americans’ medical information, but Congress subsequently reversed itself and forbade HHS to do so.

The Alliance’s position paper, ‘Safety in Numbers: Resolving shortcomings in the matching of patients with their electronic records’, does not specify which organization would issue the numbers, referring to it only as “an operating agency”.

As part of the consensus-building process, the Alliance is seeking comments on unique patient identifiers on its web site at www.nahit.org.