Duplicate and fragmented shared patient records are putting patient safety at risk and negatively affecting providers' bottom lines, costing the average hospital $1.5 million per year, finds a new Black Book survey.
An estimated 33 percent of all denied claims result from inaccurate patient identification or information, which in turn is linked to an effort to increase EHR interoperability. As these efforts increase, so do the number of duplicate patient records, the study found.
This costs the average hospital $1.5 million in 2017 and the healthcare system more than $6 billion dollars annually, the survey showed.
The crowdsourced poll of enterprise master patient index, or EMPI users, revealed that prior to administering an EMPI tool, an average 18 percent of an organization's patient records are found to be duplicates.
The average expense of repeated medical care because of duplicate records cost a reported average of $1,950 per patient for each inpatient stay, and more than $800 per emergency room visit.
Hospitals without EMPI support tools report current match rates at 24 percent when organizations exchange records.
The average clean-up for hospitals with more than 150 beds, and hundreds of thousands of records, averages more than five months, results showed. That includes process improvements such as data validity checking, normalization and data cleansing.
Hospitals with EMPI support tools in place since 2016 reported consistently correct patient identification at an overall average 93 percent of registrations and 85 percent of externally shared records among non-networked providers.
Healthcare identity vendors QuadraMed and NextGate were rated highest among 27 vendors in the satisfaction and loyalty polling of EMPI users.
Twitter: @JELagasse
Email the writer: jeff.lagasse@himssmedia.com