The National Alliance for Health Information Technology is calling for a national system of unique patient identification numbers to which patients would voluntarily subscribe.
The system would be more secure, accurate and reliable than the prevailing practice of using information such as name, address and birth date to match patients with their medical records in distributed networks, alliance officials said.
“Outside of carefully controlled pilots, accuracy for the current process is roughly 90 percent, based on our collective experience and industry estimates,” Tom Doyle, vice president and chief architect of HCA and a member of the Alliance’s Technology Leadership Committee, said in a statement. “That margin of error will only widen as it is applied to ever-larger populations.”
The 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.” There have been suggestions in the past that a private, non-profit corporation could issue health ID numbers.
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. That came after protests from privacy advocates, those already using records IDs in their own systems who did not want to change, and people concerned about government’s growing role in health care.
Asked whether government would be involved in issuing the numbers, alliance spokeswoman Lois Padovani said the organization had made no decisions about such specifics. “We’re in the process of building a consensus within the industry” about the need for national identifiers, she said.
The statistical matching techniques now being used resemble Internet search engines in several ways. The alliance said they may breach patient privacy because some records generally are returned that may or may not be for the patient being treated. Someone must look at them to determine whether there is a match, and looking at them risks violating the privacy of a patient not otherwise known to the doctor.
The Alliance is soliciting comments on this topic through its web site, www.nahit.org.
Government Health IT presents Rick Friedman, director of the division of state systems for the Center for Medicaid and State Operations with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in this recent eSeminar regarding how the federal Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services is partnering with state Medicaid and health and human services officials to bring Medicaid into the digital age. Paul McCloskey, Government Health IT editor, moderates.
