Ask a practitioner the importance of medical history of a patient. And a seasoned practitioner will tell you If as a practitioner you have access to complete history of patient record then your chances of better treatment goes high. But here's a problem. Though HIPAA has guidelines for sharing information among players in healthcare system, federal appropriations legislation of 1999 holds these players from matching patient specific information since patient unique identification information can't be used.
Records within hospitals can be matched easily since these hospitals have their own identification information for patients but when information about the patient comes from various hospitals, it doesn't have any identification system with which patient records can be matched. Hence, even though such patient matching is very much critical for effective health information exchange (HIE) implementation, it is difficult to achieve in reality. We can hope that some change will come up in near future that will address this issue but for now there are only deterministic and probabilistic ways for matching patient information.
It may then appear that the data within a hospital is easy to match since most of the hospitals have their own way of storing patient information. However, intra-hospital record management has its own challenges. The inconsistencies of patient data with hospitals are caused by:
In summary, there are issues pertaining to patient health record matching at two levels- intra and inter hospitals. We will talk about better IT implementation strategy to address these issues in the following blog.