Patient ID Now coalition applauds House action calls on Senate to follow suit

PARCA eNews – July 29, 2021 – The US House of Representatives removed the ban on research into developing a national patient ID for the third year a row. A move that the Patient ID Now coalition praised as a bi-partisan step toward greater patient safety.

In a press release, the coalition used the passage in the House to call on the US Senate, where the bill has floundered each of the past three years, to follow suit and pass the bill.

The coalition is made up of major healthcare organizations including American College of Surgeons, the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, Inc. (HIMSS), Intermountain Healthcare, and Premier Inc.
The coalition noted that the bi-partisan movement gained strength over the past year as the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the challenges of tracking the virus with patient misidentification causing duplicate records for screening and vaccination. In a strongly worded letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee the coalition made the case for single patient ID as a critical piece in improving patient safety.

"Without the ability of clinicians to correctly connect a patient with their medical record, lives have been lost and medical errors have needlessly occurred," the letter stated. "These are situations that could have been avoided had patients been able to be accurately identified and matched with their records. This problem is so dire that one of the nation’s leading patient safety organizations, the ECRI Institute, named patient misidentification among the top ten threats to patient safety."

The coalition thanked the steadfast leadership of Representative Bill Foster (D-IL) and Mike Kelly (R-PA) in shepherding the bill through the House, and House Appropriations Committee Chair Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Representative Katherine Clark (D-MA) for their continued support to advance patient identification.

Source: Patient ID Now press release