Practice Management Nuggets

Subscribe: itunes | Email | Stitcher | RadioPlayer | Spotify Patients should be asked to show their Alberta Health Care Insurance Plan (AHCIP) card and photo identification when visiting a practitioner office. But . . . it is not appropriate to keep a photocopy of the drivers license (or other photo ID) as part of the patient’s health record. Correctly collecting patient identification is important! Failure to correctly identify patients can lead to serious problems such as medication errors, as well as privacy breaches. Positive patient identification is critical to ensure patient safety and protect patient data.According to industry research cited by RAND, 7-10% of registering patients are misidentified upon entry. Patient misidentification contributes to: 27% of radiation errors 29% of medication errors 5% of wrong-patient/wrong-site surgeries 850 medical errors and 20 deaths related to blood transfusions And, of course, we must deal with the administrative headache of privacy breaches and medical id