National Patient Identifier (NPI)

See the following -

Halamka's Next Steps for the National Healthcare IT agenda

At HIMSS, I listened carefully to payers, providers, patients, developers, and researchers. Below is a distillation of what I heard from thousands of stakeholders. It is not partisan and does not criticize the work of any person in industry, government or academia. It reflects the lessons learned from the past 20 years of healthcare IT implementation and policymaking. Knowing where we are now and where we want to be, here are 10 guiding principles.

National Patient Identifier with FHIR is the answer

Direct Secure messaging has been implemented across the country by many physicians and hospitals due to ONC Meaningful Use requirements. Direct is great for clinician to patient interaction or even consults in some cases. Is this really the way that we should be sharing patient information? Ideally, we want the information in the patient record not just between two clinicians out of band and not stored in the patient history. This way anyone entering later in the patient care scenario has access to the information should it become necessary and the patient has also consented to the release. Read More »

ONC Patient Matching Project Moving Forward...Slowly

Last week, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) released the final report from its Patient Matching, Aggregation, and Linking (PMAL) Project, as well as an additional report describing a pilot project to test the Patient Demographic Data Quality Framework (PDDQ) to Support Patient Matching that was released several years ago. Funded from June 2015 through September 2018 by the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) through the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR) Trust Fund, PMAL was one of the activities I described in an earlier post. The Final Report reviews the four challenged of patient matching and linking that the PMAL project attempted to address...

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