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.   BASEshield provides the ability to prevent the assignment of a new medical record number to returning patients by accurately and quickly displaying potential matches to the registrar. Accurate identification is the proverbial “low hanging fruit”, the first step in safeguarding the patient, clinicians, and hospital. It ensures that clinicians are aware of each patient’s complete medical history. It also prevents fragmentation of a patient’s medical history under multiple numbers, eliminating the need for costly cleanups.

Improved Efficiency During Registration Process Registrars typically agree that the time required to register a returning patient is far less than the time required to register a new patient. Creation of a new patient record requires that all new information be captured. In addition to the demographic data, this may include employment information, insurance information, nearest relative and emergency contact information. By identifying that a patient’s record already exists in the system, much of the required information is already available and the registrar can simply verify the information. Once the registrar makes a request to create a new patient record, BASEshield presents suspected duplicates in order of the most likely match. The registrar then decides to either continue the assignment of a new medical record number or to attach the new visit to one of the suspected duplicates presented on the screen. Comprehensive Identification of Duplicates Using a sophisticated probabilistic scoring algorithm, BASEshield identifies returning patients by analyzing the data entered for the new registration 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 which pairs are presented to the registrar as potential matches. User Friendly Presentation Possible matches presented to the registrar by BASEshield are displayed in most likely order. Colors visually cue the reviewer as to the relationship of each data element to that of the newly collected data. The colors green, yellow and red are used in a “traffic light” approach to illustrate identically matching data, partially matching data, and data conventions that imply the pair may represent different individuals. Warnings are displayed when there is a possibility of twins or family members. From the online review screen, the user can select an existing patient or elect to continue the registration as a new patient. Non-Invasive Integration into the Registration Process BASEshield integrates non-invasively into existing registration systems. Once information for a new patient is entered, BASEshield analyzes the information to determine if there is sufficient evidence of a matching person in the person index. Only when sufficient evidence is detected does the system intervene to inform the registrar. Retention of New Demographic Data Information collected during the registration process is retained and considered to be the most current and correct information. The information collected by the registrar is attached to the selected record. This alleviates the registrar from having to request and enter the same information a second time. Accountability Reporting A major deterrent to accurate patient identification is complacency. BASEshield provides an excellent audit trail that reports all instances of suspected duplicate record generation. The report shows the action taken by the registrar along with the data that was collected and the data for the most likely match. Information is presented in a clear side-by-side format and illustrates the effectiveness of the tool, providing tangible evidence of the benefits..