Inaccurate Patient IDs Cost Hospitals $1.5M a Year
Approximately 33% of all denied hospital claims are associated with inaccurate patient identification, which costs the average hospital $1.5 million and the U.S. healthcare system more than $6 billion annually.
Black Book™ surveyed 1,392 health technology managers to help stakeholders identify gaps, challenges and successes in patient identification processes from Q3 2017 to Q1 2018.
As healthcare data creation has fast-tracked to an absolute landslide bringing with it many challenges in the identification and reconciliation of patient records because of the ways disparate systems classify, store, protect and share information.
The poll of enterprise master patient index users revealed that prior to administering an EMPI tool, an average 18% 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 averages of $1950 per patient per inpatient stay and over $800 per ED visit.
Survey respondents estimated 33% of all denied claims result from inaccurate patient identification or information costing the average hospital $1.5 million in 2017 and the US healthcare system over $6 billion dollars annually.
Hospitals without EMPI support tools report current match rates at 24% when organizations exchange records.
“Many systems still do not communicate and store data in disjointed architectures and an upsurge of identifiers continue to be created," said Doug Brown, Managing Partner of Black Book.
The average clean-up for hospitals over 150 beds with hundreds of thousands of records averages over 5 months including 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% of registrations and 85% of externally shared records among non-networked providers.
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