IEEE-USA Position On "Voluntary Healthcare Identifier"

[IEEE-USA Position Statement]

VOLUNTARY HEALTHCARE IDENTIFIER

Approved by the IEEE-USA
Board of Directors, 17 June 2004

IEEE-USA believes the use of voluntary healthcare identifiers can significantly enhance healthcare efficiency and patient safety. Consistent with the framework of the HIPAA legislation, IEEE-USA recommends that legislators and regulators develop and implement policies to create a Voluntary Healthcare Identifier Program and establish demonstration projects to document these benefits.

Policies needed to facilitate adoption include:

Congressional authority and resources for the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Committee on Health and Vital Statistics to develop and maintain a Voluntary Healthcare Identifier System
Strong penalties, including monetary, civil and criminal for privacy and security abuses
Safeguards against current or future unintended use of the information, and
Incentives for healthcare stakeholders to encourage adoption of Voluntary Healthcare Identifiers

This statement was developed by IEEE-USA's Medical Technology Policy Committee and represents the considered judgment of a group of U.S. IEEE members with expertise in the subject field. IEEE-USA is an organizational unit of the IEEE. It was created in 1973 to advance the public good and promote the careers and public-policy interests of the more than 225,000 technology professionals who are U.S. members of the IEEE. The IEEE is the world's largest technical professional society. For more information, go to http://www.ieeeusa.org.

BACKGROUND

Concern over patient safety, medical errors, disease surveillance, bio-terrorism and rising healthcare expenditures emphasize a strong need for the ability to track patients and their illnesses not only through episodes of care, but also follow them across the multiple treatment environments.

Currently, use of medical identifiers to identify patients is neither cross-referenced, nor related in any meaningful way between medical facilities or medical providers. Some of the current identifiers various institutions and providers use include: social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, insurance company or healthcare provider identifiers, and individual employee identifiers. Dependents of an employee with healthcare may be grouped under the employee, or provided their own identification. Currently, no consistent pattern is being followed.

Barriers to implementing a universal patient identifier include:

Privacy and security concerns
Lack of safeguards against unintended uses of information, and
Competitive aspirations of healthcare stakeholders

In their October 2003 report, "Patient Safety: Achieving a New Standard for Care," The Institute of Medicine states that “without a national universal health identifier, fragmentation of patient data can lead to medical errors and adverse events.”

Congress, aware of the need for a healthcare identifier system, included provisions for institution of a mandatory system in The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996. This provision did not receive strong support and has not been instituted. The other sections of the law gradually being adopted include: National Health Plan Identifier, National Provider Identifier, National Employer Identifier, Standards for Information Transactions and Data Standards, Security and Privacy Regulations.

On November 21, 2003, the Board of Directors of The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) adopted a resolution endorsing a voluntary universal healthcare identifier. See: http://www.himss.org/content/files/VPI_Resolution120920031.pdf.

IEEE-USA
1828 L Street, N.W., Suite 1202
Washington, DC 20036-5104
Phone: 202-785-0017, Fax: 202-785-0835

Last Updated: 23 June 2004
Staff Contact: Deborah Rudolph