Leading Hospitals Understand the Importance of Proper Patient Identification

The importance of proper patient identification can be felt by hospitals, patients, and everyone else involved in the caregiving process. Positive, or proper patient identification refers to hospitals successfully matching patients with their appropriate medical records. However, in practice, this is very tricky. In fact, according to a study, 38% of healthcare providers stated that they had encountered at least one incident which directly ties in with patient misidentification in the past two years.  

Why patient misidentification happens

Patient identification errors occur due to multiple reasons – duplicate medical records and overlays are just two of the many reasons. Duplicate medical records are created when a patient has more than one electronic health record to his/her name, whereas overlays referring to two different medical records belonging to different patients are merged. Both situations cause fatal harm to patients and cause irreparable damage to healthcare providers with their financials and goodwill on the line. Thus, the importance of proper patient identification is understood quite well by health systems.  

Strategies used by leading hospitals

Choosing the required number of personnel to handle a large amount of data is a must. A large provider can house up to 10 million medical records. If your one is such a health system, are you employ enough personnel to keep that humongous amount of data in check? A responsible provider not only need to ensure that the data is clean but also must maintain this state at all time. Entering clean data is one thing, but keeping it is another challenge entirely.

The selection of the software which fits your needs is the first and most important strategy. Do not opt for outdated software – these not only pose a security risk but may also be incompatible with your other software. Thus, choosing a method that enhances patient matching can save lives, for instance, a biometric patient identification platform. But more on that later. 

Obeying all laws and regulations may go a long way. In unfortunate circumstances, you can ensure your safety by letting the authorities know about the incident and your compliance with all rules to ensure the safety of patient data. 

Understanding the importance of proper patient identification

The last and most important thing – use a solution that ensures that patients are always positively identified. This is precisely where RightPatient can help you. It is a biometric patient identification platform that locks medical records with patients’ biometric data upon registration. After the registration, the platform can detect the medical record matched with the patient’s biometric data accurately within seconds. Leading healthcare providers such as Community Medical Centers and Terrebonne General Medical Center are protecting millions of patient records with RightPatient, thus ensuring positive patient identification and saving millions of dollars in the process.