In the realm of the digital landscape, medical technology has rapidly digitized records. From paper to digital formats everything has entirely changed. Here a question needs to be raised: How to efficiently manage and prevent the impacts of duplicate medical records in the healthcare system?
For an experiment, a survey was conducted by the National Institute of Health between different healthcare organizations. The purpose was to collect baseline data about duplicate medical records, their problems, and solutions. In the outcome, all healthcare organizations reported having an electronic algorithm system for duplicates.
In order to ensure that patient safety is not put at stake, this blog will guide medical professionals on how to prevent duplicating patient records in their database.
Duplicate Medical Records
Duplicate medical records as the name suggests it is multiple records of an individual. Further, duplicate patient records often happen when a lot of information about patients is available within a healthcare system.
According to the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA), a hospital in Texas was found guilty of duplicating patient records. Due to 22% of duplicates in overall patient records, the hospital was bound to bear a $96 charge per duplicate.
What Causes Duplication of Medical Records?
Duplication in medical records might happen due to the following factors:
Human Error
To err is human! Everybody believes that because we are not some sort of machine that can handle everything perfectly. There are many problems associated with humans. Factors like tiredness, shortage of time, and daily activities impact us with a lack of efficiency.
During the data entry process, humans end up with duplicate health records due to mistyping essential information related to patient identity.
Patient Self Registration
Many healthcare software platforms demand self-registration directly from patients. This results in duplicate records. This is due to the fact that patients enter different contact information and personal details. This causes the visibility of new records in the system, which leads to the duplication of medical records.
Lack of Record Management
There are numerous hospitals in every region, different medical facilities utilize different systems to store and track patients’ records. So when a patient visits another hospital, the staff members usually fill out a new form in the absence of a previous patient record.
Due to the absence of record management, a difference occurs between the first hospital form and the new one. Therefore, it’s difficult to identify the exact match in the absence of an algorithm.
Proliferation of Software System
This possibly happens at the time of merger and acquisition. When two organizations join to continue as one unit, their systems also require the same function. After acquiring with other entities, information from multiple software creates duplication.
Therefore, the information collected from various sources must be perfectly merged and reconciled to prevent duplicate records.
Incomplete Patient Documentation
Sometimes as a situation happens here patient records are not complete. There is some information missing which leads to the duplication in health records. If a professional cannot get complete patient information, it will be completed by another professional later.
Changes in Information
Updates in information arrive on a daily basis. This is because the personal information of patients changes for any reason. For example, people tend to migrate somewhere, their last names change due to marital status, and get new phone numbers.
Impact of Duplicate Medical Records
Perhaps, every duplicate health record has an adverse effect on patients, providers, and payers. Following are the elements that are highly at risk due to duplicate records.
1. Safety of Patients
Duplicate patient records can lead to serious threats to the safety of patients. This happens when healthcare professionals depend upon incorrect, incomplete, or irrelevant data.
Furthermore, duplicate records can also bring mistakes in diagnosis, prescriptions, and treatment. As a result, the patient’s condition becomes serious and proves fatal.
2. Care Management
Another serious example of interoperability is the need for care management. Care providers must reference dependable and complete information for every patient. This is meant to ensure certainty and compromise patient privacy.
3. Compliance
Duplicate medical records can put compliance of patient information at stake. If different records exist, it can be challenging to recognize which is the most perfect and up-to-date. This can further lead to mismanagement and data breaches. Duplicate information available at different places causes data theft.
4. Patient Outcomes
In the current era, patients get frustrated due to no coordination and communication gap. Connecting all patients within a health system to streamline patient outcomes. When duplicate records happen in a medical environment, the staff is bound to confirm multiple times from patients about the same information.
However, this causes more confusion in the minds of patients, staff, and the overall system. Thus increasing duplication in records.
5. Unnecessary Expense
Despite other factors, duplicate medical records can also result in a high percentage of costs for medical providers and patients. This occurs due to administrative burden, and time wasted on verifications of data.
Hence this increases more legal costs linked with HIPAA compliance or other leakage of patient data.
Strategies to Prevent Duplication of Medical Records
Standardizing Patient Identification
It is highly essential to standardize information using unique patient identifiers. It is a distinct code assigned to every patient. Moreover, it can be used to perfectly integrate patient data across different platforms.
Besides this, using a unique patient identifier system secures you from other issues. For example, it makes it possible for care providers to easily recognize patients, and their past history and minimize the chance of duplication.
Collect Right Information
Whatever it takes, find the right record. Take enough time to collect the correct information. This helps you to avoid duplicate records. This can also be achieved by rechecking patient personal information, including social security numbers.
Prevent Manual Mistakes
Keep your eyes open during the data entry process. Don’t let anything divert your concentration at the time of entering information. Avoiding data entry mistakes is significant to reduce duplicate records in the healthcare system.
This is meant to ensure that records are kept updated and eliminate duplicates caused by incorrect or old information.
Use All-in-one Software Platform
With the rapid growth in digital software solutions, care providers have a reliable choice to access a wide range of automated systems. Thus it will make data entry easier and error-free. By employing an electronic health record EHR software, healthcare organizations can simplify the chances of multiple entries.
Conclusion
Duplicate medical records might be a threat to the healthcare system. But with the right tools and management, you can take this hassle out with ease. You can overcome this issue in different ways like entering correct information and using a unique patient identifier system.
But we will recommend you to stop this problem with unique record management software. It has the potential to integrate, save, and consolidate multiple patient records seamlessly.
Say goodbye to human error, manual paperwork, and duplication in medical records with all-in-one Health Diary (A Care coordination software). Contact us to learn more!