In a recent peer-reviewed commentary, leaders from the Regenstrief Institute, Mayo Clinic and The Pew Charitable Trusts wrote that matching patient records from disparate sources “is not only achievable, but fundamental to stem the tide of the current pandemic and allow for fast action for future highly contagious viruses.”
Ben Moscovitch, health IT project director at the Pew Charitable Trusts, a research and policy organization, John Halamka, M.D., president of Mayo Clinic Platform, and Shaun Grannis, M.D., director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics at the Regenstrief Institute, penned the piece this week in npj Digital Medicine.
Specifically, they wrote, “rapid identification of COVID-19 infected and at-risk individuals and the success of future large-scale vaccination efforts in the U.S. will depend, in part, on how effectively an individual's electronic health data is securely shared among healthcare providers, care settings including hospitals and pharmacies, and other systems used to track the illness and immunization.”
For data sharing to be effective, electronic health records (EHRs) -- both those held within a single facility and those in different healthcare organizations -- must correctly refer to a specific individual. But unfortunately, as the commentary noted, patient matching rates vary widely, with healthcare facilities failing to link records for the same patient as often as half the time. As such, the authors are calling for stakeholders to urgently address the patient matching conundrum. Otherwise, the commentary state, efforts to curtail the current pandemic and future ones will be ill-advisedly delayed.
According to the authors, two core ideas—the sharing of more data and use of standards—"reflect near-term opportunities that government and healthcare organizations can implement to respond to the current pandemic and prepare for future ones. In the longer term, there may be other opportunities—such as use of biometrics, unique identifiers, or multifactor authentication—that could further enhance patient identification and matching, including for routine care. However, those options—and the associated standards that underlie their success—while worthwhile to examine cannot be designed, deployed, and implemented in a near-term manner that could help mitigate the effects of this pandemic.”
Last month, Pew wrote a letter urging Congressional leaders to support improved patient matching in EHRs to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic. The letter highlighted how the use of additional demographic data elements such as phone numbers and email addresses, along with standardizing how existing elements such as mailing addresses are recorded, could improve match rates. Those elements, in turn, could assist with both contact tracing from new cases and a future vaccination campaign, Pew said.
