Unfortunately, medical records are not always accurate, and errors like patient misidentification or identity duplication occur. CEO and co-founder of healthcare software solutions company 4medica, Oleg Bess, MD, notes how jarring it can be to encounter an electronic health record (EHR) that suddenly appears cloned or fused with someone else’s profile.

According to Dr. Bess, problems like poor data management, insufficient data maintenance, inadequately run patient registration processes, and deficient EHRs all lead to low-quality patient data, which pervades the US healthcare system. Dr. Bess points out that most laboratories still rely on paper requisitions and manually entering patient demographics. This creates a situation geared toward typing errors and a challenging clinical decision-making environment. Also, the situation gets compounded by incomplete patient records with potentially changing data like addresses, phone numbers, employers, or insurance carriers.

A discouraging medical record duplication rate of 10% is, according to Dr. Bess, typical for healthcare organizations, but some have duplication rates that reach 30%. One example cited by the Healthcare Financial Management Association points out a Texas hospital where 22% of patient records were duplicates. Former health information management director at the Children’s Medical Center Dallas, Katherine Lust, added that of those duplicate records, clinical care was impacted in 4% of cases, with delayed treatments and surgeries, as well as superfluously ordered tests.

If a patient’s record is established thoroughly and accurately from the get-go, their chances of misidentification or duplication will decrease. Dr. Bess recommends ensuring that patient registration forms employ many identifiers, like full names with middle initials, birthdates, social security numbers, etc. This will help prevent duplicate records created due to previously unrecorded data. Dr. Bess also recommends that physicians routinely check test results, insurance information, and other patient data for accuracy.

According to Dr. Bess, the ultimate answer to solving this issue is a National Patient Identifier system. In the interim, healthcare organizations and physicians would be best served to educate themselves on how to use new technologies to avoid duplicates and overlays