In April 2011WHIN was awarded a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Pioneer Portfolio for a pilot project to test how unique patient identifiers can increase patient control over their clinical information and improve the quality of medical records.  The pilot project  entitled “Reliable Patient Identification” (RPI) project will involve issuing personal identifiers using the Voluntary Universal Healthcare Identifier (VUHID) system provided by Global Patient Identifiers, Inc. (GPII).  VUHID allows participating providers to more accurately identify patients’ and access healthcare records at the time of the visit.

The purpose of the RPI project is to demonstrate that the use of a VUHID will drive measurable improvement in the accuracy of matching patient records between multiple sites of care.  The current state of the industry approach to establishing patient identity is to use an enterprise master person index (EMPI) to perform probabilistic comparison of two sets of demographic information to determine if they represent the same individual.  Industry experience indicates that there is a roughly 8-10% false negative error rate in this process and a small but non-zero false positive rate.  Both are problematic.

GPII will establish the technical infrastructure for the VUHID system, and WHIN will demonstrate the ability to implement, deploy, and use VUHID identifiers in a pilot population in actual clinical environments.  WHIN and GPII will jointly develop the materials and methods need to expand operations to new care delivery organizations and to assess the impact of deployed VUHID identifiers on the rate of identification errors.  The patients who receive these identifiers will enjoy benefits such as faster registration for medical visits, a reduction in lost clinical information and better overall care.  WHIN care delivery organization participants will experience a reduction in the rate of duplicate testing and improved patient satisfaction.

If your organization is interested in participating as a pilot site in this project please contact Jordana Nichols at jnichols@whinit.org or (562) 436-2923

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