That’s because neither technology nor clean up addresses the root causes of MPI errors on their own, such as flawed registration procedures, inadequate or poorly trained staff, naming conventions that vary from one culture to another, widespread use of nicknames, and confusion caused by name changes due to marriages and divorces.
As a result, the healthcare consulting firm Gartner strongly recommends that any healthcare organization implementing an EMPI or MPI project use systems powered by probabilistic-matching algorithms. Technology provides a powerful tool to reduce duplicate records, but it won’t eliminate MPI errors by itself.
An MPI not only provides the foundation for patient safety, it also serves as an essential risk management tool that protects healthcare organizations against potential reputational and financial losses resulting from malpractice lawsuits. — Tracy Peabody, RHIA, is senior manager of identity management solutions at QuadraMed Corporation.
Recommendations to sustain a consistently untainted MPI are as follows: • identify patterns in workflow where employees are making errors by closely monitoring their work, enabling problems to be immediately rectified; and • devise an indexing system powered by a probabilistic-matching algorithm.
These errors, known respectively as master person index (MPI) duplicates and overlays, cause caregivers to unknowingly make treatment decisions based on incomplete or inaccurate data, posing a serious risk to patient safety. Thus, it is no wonder that improving the accuracy of patient identification heads The Joint Commission’s national patient safety goals list on an annual basis.
These same staff members are often not monitored closely for compliance to training standards because the facility lacks adequate tools to conduct such surveillance .
In addition, hospitals increasingly report that patients are accessing healthcare services by assuming another person’s identity. Sometimes, this is a result of outright identity theft. Other times, it occurs when U.S. citizens and legal residents lend their insurance card to uninsured friends and relatives. Organizations can dramatically reduce this practice by asking patients to provide a photo ID along with their insurance card. Staff can then scan the photograph into the MPI system, enabling registrars to verify a patient’s identity the next time he or she is admitted.
Once hospitals identify duplicate records, they must merge and correct the errors. The larger the enterprise, the more complex the task. Unlike single-hospital entities, multihospital networks typically have more than one HIS MPI that they should integrate into an enterprise master patient index (EMPI) to generate a comprehensive view of their patients’ records.