Patient Matching’s Achilles Heel: The Hunt for Safe Harbor
The Unspoken Risk of Patient Matching
At the heart of nationwide data exchange is a fundamental compromise: patient matching. Organizations currently set matching thresholds "extremely high" to minimize the risk of releasing the wrong person's information, which constitutes a HIPAA breach.
This hyper-conservative approach to patient matching is the Achilles heel of nationwide data exchange. It frequently stops "close matches" from being returned, sacrificing data completeness for legal safety.
The Call for Regulatory Relief
The National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, Dr. Thomas Keane, MD, MBA, openly asked the industry at the Summit: How can we do this better? The most promising and "most acceptable" solution proposed was allowing some form of safe harbor for matching criteria to relieve the legal risk.
This safe harbor would provide a protective shield against penalties for false positives or negatives, incentivizing organizations to adopt more flexible matching rules. With a national patient ID politically blocked, safe harbor alternatives are essential for progress.
Why Data Quality Demands a Solution
The inability to match records accurately leads to messy data, a constant problem for users. The "3% that don’t fit the normal use case are the ones that need networks", and poor matching stops these critical records from being returned. For organizations relying on complete data for claims, intake, and quality measures, this is a significant bottleneck.
How GetPatientRecords Helps
While the industry waits for regulatory safe harbor, you cannot wait for the data you need. GetPatientRecords has built solutions that deliver better data quality and specifics today. We work across over 65,000 data sources, including QHINs, to maximize the completeness of every patient record. We focus on the downstream deduplication and data enhancement needed to turn fragmented data into accurate, usable patient histories.
Don't let matching uncertainty stop your data initiatives. Schedule a demo to see how we tackle incomplete records and poor matching today.
