Grant to Help Tackle Patient ID Issues

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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowThe Center for Biomedical Informatics at the Regenstrief Institute in Indianapolis has received a $1.7 million grant. The funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality will support research and development of "real-world, evidence-based guidelines" for matching patient identification information in the era of Big Data.
CBMI Director Shaun Grannis is the principal investigor for the project. He says "matching the correct individual to his or her health data is critical to their medical care. Statistics show that up to one in five patient records are not accurately matched even within the same health care system. As many as half of patient records are mismatched when data is transferred between health care systems. Before you can gather clinical data, you must know exactly which patient you are talking about. Our work will help electronic medical record systems better and more accurately bring together a patient’s information. Ensuring more accurate patient identification helps to reduce the number of preventable medical errors, ultimately achieving better health outcomes, which is our mission."
The grant will cover five years and help researchers’ goals of improving patient care, outcomes and accelerating discovery throughout the health care and research spectrums. Their work, which will include software, will be open source.
Co-investigators are affiliated with the Regenstrief Institute. They are Huiping Xu and Xiaochun Li from the Indiana University School of Medicine Department of Biostatistics, Joshua Vest and Chris Harle from the IU Fairbanks School of Public Health at IUPUI.
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