Concerns over patient safety related to inaccurate identification have reached a crisis level. Misidentification of a patient can lead to a clinician obtaining an incomplete or incorrect medical history. Healthcare providers overwhelmingly agree that this creates an unacceptable increase in the risk to the patient. In response to this growing concern, the National Patient Safety Foundation at the AMA, with sponsorship from the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Agency for Health Care Policy Research, convened a workshop to focus on all patient safety issues. A primary goal stated in the workshop was: “How do we make progress on patient safety in the longer term” and “What are the ‘low hanging fruit’ that we can pick to have an impact quickly?” Even with tremendous strides in technology, most admitting/registration systems provide inadequate safeguards to ensure proper patient identification. In spite of the wide array of sophisticated soundex procedures, simple spelling or keying errors often prevent accurate identification. In a climate of drastically reduced reimbursement and an increased demand for services, the financial burden to reconcile identification errors is staggering. The healthcare industry has already spent untold millions of dollars attempting to solve the problem and is predicting it to be a top priority in the coming years.   BASEnotify issues an instant email notification that informs critical personnel that a new medical record number has been assigned to a returning patient or that a patient’s identification information has inadvertently been overlaid with another person's information. Immediate notification helps safeguard the patient, clinicians, and hospital by ensuring that clinicians are aware of each patient’s complete medical history. BASEnotify identifies suspected duplicates using a sophisticated probabilistic scoring algorithm. Early notification can eliminate potential disaster caused by miskeying, misspelling or routine changes to the demographic data, ensuring accurate patient identification and timely, cost-effective care.

Immediate Notification of Duplicate Introduction BASEnotify issues an instant email notification alerting designated personnel of the introduction of a duplicate patient record. The message includes data collected for the new registration and the data for the suspected duplicate(s) that resides in the system. Personnel can take appropriate action by consolidating the patient’s medical history to avoid complications. On-demand reports may be produced showing duplicate notification activity for any date range. Immediate Notification of Overlaid Patient Information BASEnotify also issues an instant email notification to designated personnel to alert of potential overlays of patient information. This occurs when personnel have inadvertently selected the wrong patient and overlaid their information. In many cases, this results in the clinicians being supplied with medical history for the wrong patient. The message includes images of the original data as it was prior to the overlay along with the changed information. Personnel can take appropriate action and avoid potential complications. On-demand reports showing overlay notification activity for any date range may also be produced. Comprehensive Identification of Duplicates Using a sophisticated probabilistic scoring algorithm, BASEnotify identifies returning patients by analyzing the data obtained from the inbound interface transaction against the full Master Patient Index. Medibase’s proven algorithm determines whether there is sufficient evidence of a match. Data normalization, phonetic mapping and transposition checking are just a few techniques employed to maximize the chances of finding an existing patient or guarantor. This process quantifies the cumulative evidence into a single score in order to determine when a notification is justified. Non-invasive Integration into the Host ADT system BASEnotify integrates non-intrusively into all registration systems. Once patient information is entered, BASEnotify analyzes the information to determine if there is sufficient evidence of duplication or overlay. Designated personnel are only notified when sufficient evidence has been detected.