Pew Urges Federal Government to Improve Patient Matching, Data Extraction in Health Records

The Pew Charitable Trusts sent a letter Feb. 12 to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, urging it to take steps to improve the exchange of patients’ health information by addressing patient matching among electronic health record systems and the use of application programming interfaces–electronic tools that essentially serve as bridges between two types of software–to extract and use data from medical records.