CHIME is offering a sweet deal for innovators with a way to accurately match patients with their healthcare information. At stake? Patient safety.

The CHIME $1 million National Patient ID Challenge is open to anyone around the world.

CHIME will launch its challenge early this summer on HeroX platform, co-founded by XPRIZE CEO Peter Diamandis.

CHIME, or College of Health Information Management Executives, is made up of 1,400 CIOs and IT managers.

As CHIME sees it, the digitization of the U.S. healthcare system maintains that electronic health records must be able to seamlessly share and exchange information. Interoperability, however, is not enough. To realize their full potential, patient data contained in the EHR must be accurate in order to support the requirements of coordinated, accountable, patient-centered care. It's critical to patient safety.

"There is a growing consensus among payers and providers that a unique patient ID would radically reduce medical errors and save lives," said CHIME CEO and President Russell P. Branzell, in a news release. "Incomplete or duplicate health records present significant issues in terms of patient safety, and there is a pressing need for preventing, detecting and removing inaccurate records so hospitals can positively match the right data with the right patient in order to provide the best possible care."

[See also: CIOs push for patient ID progress.]

Duplicate or inaccurate patient records can occur from manual data entry errors, or when two or more individuals share the same name. This presents considerable concern for different individuals being identified as the same patient, potentially resulting in inadequate treatment or unintended injury.

Consider data collected by the Harris County Hospital District in Houston where there are 2,488 actual patients named Maria Garcia – in which 231 of those share the same birth date, CHIME points out. Further, a patient's name may evolve throughout a lifetime, resulting in multiple records for the same individual (i.e. Jonathan L. Smith Jr.). Also, one incorrectly typed key in a middle name, address or social security number can lead to a duplicate medical record.

According to a 2012 CHIME survey of healthcare CIOs, error rates due to patient mismatching averaged 8 percent and ranged up to 20 percent. Moreover, 19 percent of the 128 respondents indicated that their hospital had experienced an adverse event during the course of the year due to a patient information mismatch.

[See also: Montefiore CIO on patient ID, pop health.]

"This needs to be the year of positive patient identification," said CHIME Board Chair Charles E. Christian, vice president and CIO of St. Francis Hospital in Georgia, in a press statement. "Healthcare CIOs have long struggled with a lack of national standards for eradicating the burdens of matching patient data when engaging in health information exchange. As those charged with leading health information technology, we have a responsibility to ensuring the technology we're implementing leads to better, safer, more efficient patient care."

Costly patient matching inaccuracies are far-reaching; impacting clinical, financial and operational hospital performance. According to the 2012 CHIME survey, more than three full-time employees are needed to reconcile disparate or duplicate information from patient health records.

A coalition of industry partners from the vendor and association communities lent their support for CHIME's National Patient ID Challenge. "Accurately matching patients with their health records, no matter where they have been collected or stored, remains a pressing challenge for our entire industry," said Howard Messing, president and CEO of MEDITECH. "We look forward to learning about any ideas that can meet this need, while still maintaining the highest levels of security and confidentiality possible."

"As health information exchange becomes more prevalent, patient matching is a perennial issue," said Lynne Thomas Gordon, CEO of the American Health Information Management Association. "A solution would be a significant step toward ensuring the integrity of health information and, as a result, better patient care. AHIMA is proud to support this challenge."

Joel White, executive vice director of the Health IT Now Coalition, called the announcement "exciting" because the need has been there for a long time.  "As technology and data play ever greater roles in improving health and safety and lowering health costs, patient identification in care delivery is increasingly complex, but increasingly necessary.  HITN is confident the creative and capable souls will step up and solve the problem."

As CHIME works to raise the $1 million prize money, it has put a task force of healthcare IT leaders in place charged with assigning challenge guidelines and winning criteria.

"Unintended injury attributable to patient data-matching error is a considerable and growing problem in this era of health information exchange," added Branzell.  "Despite years of development, no clear strategy on patient matching has emerged. Our hope is that this challenge will reach a diverse audience and inspire the kinds of ideas needed to implement change and improve patient outcomes."