“Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-New Hampshire, penned a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the US Postal Service (USPS), urging the two organizations to join forces to enhance patient matching and improve patient outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“In May, Pew Charitable Trusts outlined four ways that policymakers can build on existing systems and policies to strengthen the nation’s public health infrastructure for COVID-19 and future endeavors. Using this information from Pew, Hassan recommended HHS utilize USPS address standardization to increase patient matching accuracy.”
“According to a 2019 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), the integration of this data can increase patient matching by up to 3 percent. Hassan’s letter expressed support of integrating these data sets.”
“‘Though the goal of an EHR system is to provide better coordinated care and to improve health outcomes and reduce costs, the COVID-19 outbreak has demonstrated that gaps in the ability to correctly link records for the same patient across different sites of care can impede key pandemic response efforts, such as contract tracing,’ Hassan wrote.
“’HHS and USPS have a unique opportunity to improve patient and public health by collaborating to enhance the accuracy with which EHR systems can share data with one another,’ she added…” Read the full article here.
Source: Sen. Urges HHS, USPS to Collaborate on Patient Matching, Amid COVID-19 – By Christopher Jason, July 16, 2020. EHR Intelligence.
