Title: Patient Identity – A Hospital’s Clinical Responsibility
By: B. Christopher Linder, Senior Client Executive, SearchAmerica
It’s Sunday afternoon in the ER of an outlying hospital in the Midwest. The radiologist arrived and completed his review of some X-rays from a car accident victim admitted the night before. He identified several blood clots which needed to be treated or a massive stroke may result. However, as no injuries were found the patient was released earlier that morning.
No problem.
The physician calls the phone number on the patient’s record only to find it disconnected. A day nurse offers to drive by the address on her way home and ask the patient to call her physician immediately. Unfortunately, the address is a vacant lot.
Due to inaccurate demographic information, the patient will never know of her condition, perhaps until it is too late. There is no way to know whether she willingly provided errant information, was too confused by the accident to recall details correctly, or the hospital’s registrar keyed in the information wrong.
Now some may regret the hospital’s inability to recover the costs of her treatment, but most of us would feel most affected by the knowledge that someone out there needed medical help right away and they couldn’t be reached.
Clinically, the hospital did not serve the patient to the best of its ability.
During my decades in healthcare systems throughout the country, I have seen this scenario or similar ones repeated too many times. Too often hospital personnel assume that knowing a patient’s identity is needed only for billing, insurance and other administrative purposes, and forget the clinical importance of this data.
Identity Is Part of Patient Care
Patient identity is a critical piece of the patient’s care and community service, and the most effective and accurate means of providing this information is through automated demographic validation solutions.
Often, medical staff sees automation as a means of minimizing one-on-one interaction with the patient. After all, technology and computers don’t have a pulse so they must be the opposite of caring. In the case of validating a patient’s identity, this mindset couldn’t be more wrong.
Automating how a hospital identifies a patient shows it is interested in the patient’s long-term health.
Accurate information ensures that information for all visits from the patient are included in a single patient record. X-ray and lab results received after discharge can be forwarded to them and/or their doctor as needed, and any associated hospital communications can reach them without delay.
Civically, it is a hospital’s duty to use appropriate measures to locate a patient after discharge if medically necessary, or contact next of kin if needed.
The following real-life example demonstrates how important to the patient and their family proper identification can be:
The police brought a homeless man to the ER who was found in a coma under a bridge where he appeared to have been living for several weeks. After 10 days in the hospital and still in a coma, an aide found an old Social Security card in the man’s backpack. Utilizing this information, the hospital was able to use their demographic and address checking system to uncover the last known address for this individual. The address was on the opposite coast, and when the hospital tried the phone number, a woman answered. It was the patient’s daughter, who hadn’t seen her father in more than eight years. Using digital photos, she
immediately identified her father and was able to have him moved to a hospital near her for future treatment.
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