On February 15, 2024 Reps Mike Kelly and Bill Foster introduced the Patient Matching and Transparency in Certified Health IT (Match IT) Act of 2024 in conjunction with the Patient ID Now coalition (see their press release). The Act has three major parts which call for Health and Human Services (HHS) to:
- Establish a uniform definition of “patient match rate” and update it at least every three years as needed.
- Develop a standard data set to improve patient matching by consulting a wide variety of stakeholders, including public health agencies.
- Incorporate this minimum data set into EHR certification requirements and Promoting Interoperability program requirements, but in no way require a 99.9% match rate.
It seems like much of this work has already been done. As we described in an article published way back in 2017, ONC convened a Patient Matching Community of Practice in 2014-15. We wrote,
Its major focus was developing a five-level data quality maturity model to try to characterize an organization’s sophistication in using different common data elements to perform patient matching functions, as well as articulating value propositions for improved matching for different stakeholder types. The project released two documents, Developing and Testing a Data Management Model and Maturity Scale Tailored to Improving Patient Matching Accuracy and Guidelines for Pilot Testing of Data Management Maturity℠ Model for Individual Data Matching describing its work. The Data Quality Maturity Scale, included as Appendix B, highlights how systems across the healthcare community, at least as reflected in the core data elements, are at the high levels of maturity. In practice, however, the data elements needed for levels 4 and 5 are precisely the ones that are least consistently captured.
In addition, in January 2019 AIRA published its IIS Functional Guide, Vol. 2: CDC Endorsed Data Elements. This exhaustive document includes (in Appendix C) a list of data elements endorsed to fulfill the IIS functional standard of identifying, preventing and resolving duplicated and fragmented patient records using an automated process.
Finally, Congress continues to keep in place a prohibition against funding any implementation of a “unique health identifier” – it might have been useful if the proposed Act took on that issue as well.