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Health Care's Identity Crisis

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Secure patient ID is key to curbing medical identity theft and protecting electronic record

The health care industry is in the process of switching from paper to electronic medical records. President Obama set aside more than $19 billion for health care providers to deploy the electronic records in order to streamline health information. But with the transition there are concerns about linking the correct electronic record to the correct patient.

Linking to the wrong record can lead to misdiagnosis and medical complications. According to the independent health care ratings organization HealthGrades, more than 195,000 deaths occur annually in the United States because of medical errors. Almost 60% of these deaths were attributable to a failure to correctly identify the patient, according to a Smart Card Alliance white paper.

There are 3421 words in the rest of this article …

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To commemorate the smart card industry’s achievements throughout 2011, the Smart Card Alliance has decided to release its first-ever E-Yearbook.

The nearly 70-page e-book discusses the year’s leadership and advancement in the smart card industry and highlights industry achievements.

read more »

VeriTeQ announced its plans to offer the FDA-cleared VeriChip microchip, a rice grain-sized passive RFID microchip, for the identification of breast implants and other medical devices.

read more »

British Columbia is moving forward with plans to upgrade its CareCard program. According to The Vancouver Sun, the new card will provide access to a variety of regional services including electronic health records, driver license and school registration for children.

read more »

VeriTeQ announced it has acquired the VeriChip implantable microchip and related technologies and Health Link Web-based personal health record (PHR) from Positive ID. VeriChip is the FDA-cleared RFID implantable microchip for humans and patient identification.

read more »

Finis Conner Permalink
September 9, 2010 7:50 PM

195,000 individuals die each year for medical errors....IF 390 747s crashed each year with 500 on board, SOMETHING WOULD BE DONE....The primary issues is to make sure "the person is who he/she says they are" and access to critical medical information my StorCard, www.storcard.com , can enable this and carry the entire medical history of the patient, fully encrypted.....

The existing smartcard providers are PURPOSELY limiting capacity because as capacity goes up to store more information, they MUST change the readers and they don't want to do that....this is a CRIME

Lets fix this problem..

Finis Conner Conner Investments, LLC fconner@gmail.com

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Medical Quack Permalink
September 14, 2010 11:34 PM

Speaking of linking erroneous data it would behoove Health Grades to remove the dead doctors from their referral listings and the insurance they honor, one example of an MD that has been deceased for almost 7 years still in their system and skews numbers I would think. Other sites may use the same data base, not sure but 8 other doctor rating/referral sites show the same.

http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2010/09/healthgrades-and-other-md-rating-and.html

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Penny Schlyer Permalink
September 21, 2010 5:13 PM

A Master Patient Index (MPI) or patient registry helps solve patient identity problems by matching and linking records across disparate systems. The technology has been tested extensively in the NHIN trials and is in use across major healthcare providers, Canada, many regional HIEs, the national ePresribing network, pharmacies, payers and more. A standards-based solution that integrates with new, legacy and specialty applications is proven to be critical at the foundation of any EHR or HIE initiative. IBM Initiate delivers accurate, proven and scalable patient and provider registry technology. To learn more about how Brooklyn Health Information Exchange is using the technology, visit http://bit.ly/cGLsRi.

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