The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), today announced that CHIME Healthcare Innovation Trust has decided to suspend the National Patient ID Challenge after nearly two years of work. Despite the suspension, CHIME did emphasized that finding a national patient ID solution that accurately identifies a patient 100% percent of the time will remain a top priority.
Launched in 2015, CHIME National Patient ID Challenge is a $1 million global competition aimed at incentivizing new, early-stage, and experienced innovators to accelerate the creation and adoption of a solution for ensuring 100% accuracy in identifying patients in the U.S. Patients want the right treatment and providers want information about the right patient to provide the right treatment. It is estimated that the current accuracy rate of patient ID matching at even the most sophisticated hospitals is only around 80 percent, which means that there is a 1 in 5 chance that a patient’s safety, privacy or security will be compromised.
As part of the next steps, CHIME will assist in developing a Patient Identification Task Force through CHIME Healthcare Innovation Trust, the CHIME affiliate that sponsored the CHIME National Patient ID Challenge. CHIME commends the Challenge innovators for their commitment to improving healthcare and is encouraging them to participate on the task force moving forward.
“We firmly believe that accurate patient identification is fundamental to patient care today and that innovation will lead to better, more affordable, more accessible and more equitable care,” said Russell Branzell, president and CEO of CHIME in a statement. “Though we’ve made great progress and moved the industry forward in many ways through the Challenge, we ultimately did not achieve the results we sought to this complex problem. We decided the best course for addressing this patient safety hazard is to redirect our attention and resources to another strategy.”
“We will continue to lead, but we cannot do this alone,” Branzell said, noting that Washington has signaled a possible easing of restrictions on supporting a national patient identification solution. Still, these actions are not sufficient to meet CHIME’s goals. “We need industry and government to join us with the same level of passion and commitment that our members show in their positions as CIOs and senior health IT executives.”
