Managing the Integrity of Patient Identity

Take a moment to learn more about managing patient identity in this guest post from Barbara Demster, Chair, HIMSS Patient Identity Integrity Committee.

Because of potential for impact on quality of care and patient safety, patient identity management is a long-standing challenge to healthcare organizations, provider offices and anywhere patient databases are collected. Health information exchanges exacerbate the problem of identity management through bringing an exponential increase in the population at risk to match.

The HIMSS Work Group on Patient Identity Integrity (PII) published a White Paper on Patient Identity Integrity that identifies key issues on the accuracy and completeness of matching data attached to or associated with an individual patient and the linking of all such data within and across systems. The paper discusses critical business processes that must be in place to support and maintain the integrity of the data for quality of care, patient safety and cost management. 

In researching for the white paper, the HIMSS PII Work Group discovered no central source existed for information on the topic of patient identity integrity and found it difficult to gather information and resources, if they existed at all. The work group decided to create a toolkit to serve as a central repository for information focused on this topic.

Now, this new online resource, the Patient Identity Integrity Toolkit, is available on the HIMSS website. The toolkit includes existing and new resources created to fill identified gaps in the literature.  Selected content supports the more than 50 recommendations in the whitepaper and enhances the industry’s understanding of patient identity integrity and the many issues involved in reliably – and safely – matching patient identity across systems.

Divided into seven sections, the toolkit covers: 

1. Security safeguards
2. Model interface protocols
3. Key performance indicators
4. Model data practices
5. Model monitoring reports
6. Executive training, and
7. Existing literature/publications.

Members can contribute to the toolkit by sharing tools they have found valuable, submitting ideas for new content or providing feedback that will help enhance this resource. The Privacy and Security Toolkit Content Review Task Force will review all submission before posting. 

Barbara Demster                                                                                                                                 Chair – HIMSS Patient Identity Integrity Committee                                                           Former Chair,  HIMSS Privacy & Security Committee