The Western Health Information Network (WHIN) has received a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Pioneer Portfolio for a pilot project to test how unique patient identifiers can increase patient control over their clinical information and improve the quality of medical records.

The pilot project will involve issuing personal identifiers using the Voluntary Universal Healthcare Identifier (VUHID) system provided by Tucson-based Global Patient Identifiers, Inc. (GPII). VUHID allows participating providers to more accurately identify patients’ and access healthcare records at the time of the visit.

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The grant was awarded to a collaboration between WHIN, a regional health information organization serving Southern California, and GPII, a non‐profit company focused on a single healthcare identifier solution.

“One of the thorniest problems in our healthcare system is correctly identifying all the records for a given patient across the community," said Albert O. Shar, vice president with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. "It’s critical to protect a patient’s privacy but it’s essential that we know as much about a patient as we can in order to deliver safe and effective care."

Barry Hieb, MD, chief scientist at GPII, added that there are "a number of niches where the lack of accurate patient identification is causing big problems for our healthcare system – increasing the possibility of medical errors and unnecessary testing. We think that by improving the accuracy of patient identification, which will lead to giving patients more control over the privacy of their information, we can make great strides toward resolving these issues."

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“We’ve looked at these kinds of problems, particularly as represented by parents of children with special needs,” says Laura Landry, WHIN’s executive director. “Their children often have a large team of doctors that handle different aspects of their child’s care, so these parents often carry bulging folders of medical records between doctor visits to ensure the health information from previous visits is available to their current doctor.

"They would love to have a way to ensure that all their kid’s doctors are on the same page," she added. "Of course, all healthcare consumers will benefit from using unique identifiers to ensure that records from previous visits are accurately linked so that clinicians have a complete picture of the patient’s health profile."

The project was officially started in mid‐April and is expected to continue into mid‐2012 – by which time WHIN and GPII will determine and quantify the benefits and challenges of unique identifiers among a population of patients in the Los Angeles area.