While healthcare providers are increasingly sharing electronic health records, they continue to face challenges in matching patients to their EHRs, according to the Government Accountability Office.
Patients are matched to their medical records—either manually or automatically via software—through demographic information, such as name, date of birth or sex.
However, a GAO audit based on stakeholder interviews found that “inaccurate, incomplete or inconsistently formatted demographic information in patients’ records” is posing challenges to matching medical records. Particularly problematic is the matching of medical records for newborns and multiple-birth siblings such as twins, according to the report.
