Pew Proposes Ways Federal Government Can Improve Patient Matching in Electronic Health Records

The Pew Charitable Trusts wrote to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology on July 23, urging the agency to make better patient matching a priority and proposing ways to do so. Pew outlined three steps that the agency could take: adopting additional data elements for patient matching across health IT systems; standardizing the demographic data that is already collected; and investigating innovative solutions for a unique patient identifier, such as biometrics.