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Biometric Solutions Could Enhance Patient Safety and Claim Payment
Innovations such as EHR and biometric identification MOS: Medical Record Review Service 8596 E. 101st Street, Suite H Tulsa, OK 74133
solutions can improve the quality of care provided in hospitals and other healthcare settings, and ensure better patient health outcomes apart from facilitating medical review services.
Innovations such as the electronic health record can improve the quality of care provided in hospitals and other healthcare settings, and ensure better patient health outcomes apart from facilitating medical review services and such other solutions vital for medical and legal processes. Given the importance of superior quality care, there are many aspects healthcare providers must focus on including proper identification of patients and strict adherence to clinical guidelines. It has been proved that hospitals with established processes of care demonstrate better patient outcomes. Patient Misidentification – a Major Challenge for Hospitals One of the major challenges hospitals face is patient misidentification. • A Rand Corp analysis cited in The Wall Street Journal says that patients are misidentified 7 to 10% of the time. • A 2016 Ponemon Institute report that surveyed more than 500 healthcare executives found that most misidentification issues occur during registration. o 64% of respondents said that patient misidentification errors occur frequently or all the time. o 86% of providers said that they have witnessed or were aware of medical errors caused by patient misidentification. o 9% of 7,600 wrong patient events resulted in temporary or permanent patient harm or even death, according to an ECRI (an independent non-profit organization that researches approaches to improving patient care) report. Quite distressing indeed! Risks Associated with Misidentification
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Apart from creating patient safety issues, misidentification of patients also has a negative impact on the hospital’s bottom line. The average hospital loses around $17.4 million per year in denied claims originating from misidentification, the Ponemon Institute points out. These claim denials are mainly because of duplicate medical records. • Duplicate medical records may not contain the complete and accurate medical history of the patient and even lack important information. • Decisions physicians make based on incomplete information will result in unnecessary
tests,
incorrect
medication
and
care,
ineffective
treatments, and denied claims. • All this will lead to excess costs for both the hospital and the patient. The average EHR system contains around 8 to 12 percent duplicate medical records which would require up to $1,000 to correct, says the American Health Information Management Association Foundation (AHIMA). If there is a medical record overlay, it would cost up to $5,000. Duplicate records used for identity fraud negatively impacts proper patient identification. When registering, if the patients are presenting fraudulent identification/insurance cards, they are at the risk of adverse events. What Are Hospitals Doing? So what are hospitals doing about this? Errors resulting from misidentification can negatively impact patient safety as well as the organization’s financial health. Nowadays, manual identification processes are not enough. Liability concerns prevent hospitals from requesting social security numbers from patients, and it is common for patients to have similar names or birth dates. In addition, human error can result in mistyped information. So, hospitals are
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seen to increasingly leverage technology such as biometrics to protect their patients and themselves. Identity verification solutions based on biometric technology can ensure identity assurance and authentication, thereby increasing privacy and security, lowering healthcare fraud instances, making care available to the right patient, and reducing medical errors. Hospitals and clinics can track clientele, and use these solutions for client registration, treatment tracking, patient scheduling and so on. Patient identification solutions can also accommodate national and private health insurance cards, ambulant treatment documents, wrist bands, and the most important biometric identification modalities such as iris, fingerprint and palm vein recognition. Imprivata PatientSecure® is a reliable patient identification solution that creates a 1:1 match between patients and their medical records based on patients’ biometric identification. This can be used at any point across the care continuum. This system offers multiple methods for biometric identification including iris scans and palm vein scans. The palm-vein scan can be used in any workflow, even when the patient is unconscious. The iris technology allows a touch-less identification process with a single-step photo capture during enrolment. This system eliminates the creation of duplicate or overlaid medical records. It helps prevent medical errors and adverse events resulting from misidentification, and medical identity theft. Community Hospital Anderson (CHA), a 207-bed, licensed Indiana facility has implemented Imprivata PatientSecure to improve financial performance and patient safety. Iowa’s Broadlawns Medical Center is another healthcare facility that has integrated a biometric system with its registration process. They use palm-vein scanning with Fujitsu’s palm-vein scanner to provide the right care to the right
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patient, strengthen patient safety, secure the registration process, and prevent identity theft. They experienced a considerable return on investment as well following the implementation. Advances in medical technology and the many benefits it provides are exciting to entities in the medical field including physicians, hospital systems and providers of medical review solutions that interact with these entities on a routine basis. It is a great boon that we now have solutions available that can enhance patient safety and prevent errors such as misidentification. These solutions positively impact a healthcare organization’s bottom line while also enabling it to be fully committed to ensuring patient safety and a positive patient experience.
www.mosmedicalrecordreview.com
(800) 670 2809