Recommendation

Congress should direct HHS to implement a unique patient identifier.

Details

While U.S. hospitals and doctors have widely adopted electronic health records, health-care providers do not have an accurate and efficient method to match patients to their records, so they often rely on Social Security numbers as identifiers, creating quality, safety, and cost problems. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has identified an “urgent and critical” need to create a standardized system of unique patient identifiers for health care, and the original language of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) would have created a national universal patient-identifier system, but subsequent legislation blocked the implementation of such a program. Congress should direct HHS to implement a unique patient identifier as originally intended by HIPAA.

Keep reading:

▪ Daniel Castro, Joshua New, and Matt Beckwith, “10 Steps Congress Can Take to Accelerate Data Innovation” (ITIF, Center for Data Innovation, May 2017), http://www2.datainnovation.org/2017-data-innovation-agenda.pdf.