Children's CIO Discusses Need for Accurate Patient ID System
Healthcare Informatics
Mary Anne Leach, VP and chief information officer at Children's, talked with Healthcare Informatics about the importance of an accurate system for patient identification.
Children's Hospital Colorado has a fully integrated electronic health record (EHR) system that is accessed through the hospital's computer network and is made up of medical records from patients at all of Children's Hospital Colorado locations. Healthcare information - patient medical files, the medications they take and health updates during doctor visits - will be stored and accessed in this way, allowing doctors and nurses to retrieve information about a patient at any given time.
To help with the patient identification process, Children's has implemented two patient index systems - Chicago-based Initiate Systems' Interoperable Health and Epic's Identity EMPI. Leach says that these two systems help maintain a low error rate in the patient identification process.
Leach said in the Healthcare Informatics article that she is looking at how Children's can further optimize the use for the two patient index systems. “What I look for in these tools is the ability to identify key data elements and be able to match on them using weighted criteria - at least that minimum level of sophistication.”
Read the full Healthcare Informatics story.
