Dive Brief:
- The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) has a petition going to remove a 16-year federal budget ban that prevents HHS from developing unique patient identifiers.
- Although the original 1996 HIPAA law had a requirement to create unique patient identifiers for every patient, privacy issues pushed Congress to create a ban against it.
- The group's petition needs 100,000 signatures before April 19 for the Obama administration to consider it.
Dive Insight:
The ban imposed by Congress prevents HHS from using federal funds to create nationally unique patient identifiers, despite the American Hospital Association and other industry groups supporting the potential benefits of these identifiers since 2014 to help facilitate patient health information exchange on a bigger scale, Becker's Health IT & CIO Review reported.
Today, twenty years after HIPAA was passed, Lynne Thomas Gordon, CEO of AHIMA said in a Journal of AHIMA report, that the prevalence of EHRs poses patient privacy and safety issues without a patient identification strategy.
"AHIMA is confident the technology exists to solve this problem while ensuring that patient privacy is protected," she said. "But it will require public-private collaboration and open discussion."
In January, the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) announced a $1 million global competition to design a national patient identification system - called the National Patient ID Challenge, as reported by Healthcare Dive.
The idea is that a system that accurately identifies patients could improve the quality of care, reduce errors, and save costs. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT says each patient misidentification case can set back an organization $1,200.