“A bill to amend title XXX of the Public Health Service Act to establish standards and protocols to improve patient matching.”
No CRS summary available for this bill.
This section finds that accurate patient identification is essential to health care interoperability under the 21st Century Cures Act and HITECH Act, yet no national strategy or standard definition of patient match rate exists. It states that match rates can be as low as 80 percent, causing medical errors, privacy risks from overlaid records, repeated tests, and more than $6.7 billion in annual costs from denied claims.
This section establishes a uniform definition and standards for patient match rates, accounting for duplicate records, overlaid records, multiple matches, and mismatch rates, to be developed by the Secretary within 180 days and reviewed every 3 years. It requires the National Coordinator to identify and adopt a minimum data set supporting 99.9 percent patient matching within 180 days, develop related data standards within 1 year, and incorporate both into the United States Core Data for Interoperability after consulting specified stakeholders. The section mandates incorporation of the data set into health IT certification criteria within 180 days and into Medicare Promoting Interoperability Program requirements within 2 years thereafter, and directs CMS to create a voluntary bonus measure allowing eligible providers to receive payment adjustments for achieving at least a 90 percent match rate.