In a bid to smooth data exchange between disparate technology systems, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has launched a collaborative project to seek out common denominators and best practices being used for patient matching by private healthcare systems and other federal agencies.

By identifying and recommending standardization of the attributes most commonly used for matching, the project aims to improve patient safety, care coordination and efficiency, wrote Lee Stevens, policy director for ONC's State HIE Program.

Stevens said the initiative will focus on two objectives related to patient matching.

First, it seeks to define common attributes that achieve high positive match rates across disparate systems. "These attributes may include common fields such as name, date of birth, address, sex, cell phone number and new criteria such as emergency contact and insurer," he wrote.

Second, the project hopes to define the processes and best practices that are most effective to support high positive patient matching rates utilizing these attributes.

Environmental scans and widespread literature reviews will be conducted to inform the next steps in the Patient Matching Initiative, says Stevens. Partners in the ONC project will include the Federal Health Architecture -- which comprises more than 20 federal agencies, including the Departments of Health & Human Services, Defense and Veterans Affairs -- and organizations such as HIMSS, CHIME, the Bipartisan Policy Center, HealtheWay and the EHR/HIE Interoperability Work Group.

In a separate statement, CHIME lauded the patient matching effort, saying it will lead to saved lives, improved population health and lower costs.

"Patient data-matching is a foundational component to the exchange of electronic health information -- which, in turn, is a critical component for improved care coordination and quality improvement," said CHIME President and CEO Russell P. Branzell. "Despite years of development, no clear strategy has emerged to accurately and consistently match patient data. As we advance interoperability and health information exchange, we are delighted to see ONC take action to ensure the right data is matched with the right patient. This is a necessary, concrete step to bolster patient safety."

Officials said the initiative complements activities currently underway through CHIME's StateNet, whose Patient Data-Matching Workgroup has developed a charter document to "take a leadership role in establishing a patient matching policy/strategy that is adopted by federal officials, state policymakers and other relevant audiences, such as the vendor community."

The workgroup will identify technologies, implementation practices and data integrity mechanisms, such as data entry and versioning, that will ensure the most efficient, scalable and robust mitigation of patient matching errors.

"False negative and false positive error rates are unacceptably high, despite new generations of algorithms and biometric technologies," said the workgroup's chair, Ralph Johnson, chief information officer at Franklin Community Health Network in Farmington, Maine, in a statement. "Unintended injury or illness attributable to patient data-matching error is a considerable, and growing, problem in this era of health information exchange. National leadership and consistent standards in this area will set a floor for safe patient matching that will, in turn, help focus industry activity towards improved patient data-matching."

As for the ONC initiative, many large integrated delivery networks and state and local health information exchange organizations will also sign on to the project, said Stevens. The Patient Matching Initiative will end later this year, and participants will present a list of recommendations to ONC for consideration.

Baltimore-based technology company Audacious Inquiry -- having provided market reports on patient matching and other topics related to the implementation of health information exchange to ONC -- will also help support these activities, he said. In its work for the Maryland Health Information Exchange, or CRISP, Ai has implemented and oversees patient matching activities in that state.

[See also: HIE 2.0 in the works]