HIEs and Patient Matching

Noam Arzt, PhD, president and founder of HLN Consulting

Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) represent a collection of organizations that choose to work together to exchange electronic health information. While consistently identifying patients is hard enough within a single practice, clinic, hospital, or integrated delivery network (IDN), when spanning multiple organizations in an HIE the challenges become multiplied. The differences in the organizations their policies, their technologies, their activities bring some specific challenges when trying to consistently identify patients. Here are some key issues with respect to HIE and patient identity integrity, and some comments and suggestions related to resolving the issues:  Continue Reading…