In Harris County Texas, there are more than 69,000 pairs of people who share the same names and birth dates, according to entrepreneur David Batchelor. That’s the kind of thing that’s causing so much “dirty data” in hospitals’ medical records systems.
“Right now there’s no way for an individual registration clerk to know that it is you that they’re admitting and that they got the right you,” said Batchelor, who five years ago started a health IT company called LifeMed ID. “There are standards (for patient registration), but there’s no way to audit whether those standards are adopted.”
Duplicate electronic medical records, which he said account for between 5 and 15 percent of all records, are created as a result of misspellings, typos, nicknames, etc., but the common thread is that they originate with patient registration. With LifeMed ID, Batchelor and his team want to establish that standard for patient identification and make sure it’s adopted at all of the places a patient’s record is viewed and edited, meanwhile creating an audit trail of every place that patient has checked in to.
The company provides the back-end workings of identity tokens like smart cards and biometric scans. Its platform integrates with practice management systems using HL7 technology and the cloud to connect disparate health IT systems. SecureReg authenticates patient identities by linking each patient’s “identity token” – his smart card or biometric scan – to his correct medical record number.
“We don’t care whether it’s an iris scan or a face scan or a card or a driver’s license; we don’t really care what the identity mechanism is,” Batchelor explained. The long-term goal is to speed up the registration process and ensure that each patient has just one portable record that can be accessed everywhere within a patient’s network — at the hospital, pharmacy, or wherever else he might obtain care, to
That includes anywhere an accident or disaster could happen. The company also has what it calls EMS Gateway, which provides emergency medical responders access to information like prescriptions, allergies, insurance and advance directives in the LifeMed ID cloud. Through the gateway, EMS personnel can also communicate data to emergency rooms or local disaster centers in anticipation of a patient’s arrival.
Let’s be clear, though; the smart card idea isn’t novel. France, Taiwan and a number of other European and Asian countries with universal healthcare have used smart cards to identify and track patients for years. Congress is weighing legislation that would issue such cards to Medicare patients. Several companies in the U.S. market patient identification technologies like PatientSecure, M2SYS, LifeNexus and NextgenID, and there’s even a Smart Card Alliance. Batchelor claims that those companies specialize only in biometrics, though, not in interoperability.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
More than 40 locations are currently piloting the system, including Resolute Health in Texas and Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in New York.
[Image credit: FreeDigitalPhotos user cooldesign]
