Accurate Identification Increases Patient Safety
Patient search for scheduling, registration, and admissions must happen quickly and accurately. Patient safety, revenue cycle, and risk mitigation depend on positively identifying patients.
Patient records are not easy to find—especially when patient names are hard to spell, have common names, or typographic errors are made. Patients can also be anxious, have language barriers, or be known by multiple names, for example nicknames or maiden names. Compounding the problem, electronic healthcare records systems (EHRs) use older search technology and work poorly when medical records do not exactly match the search criteria.
Duplicate or overlay patient records are created in most every healthcare system, most every day, due to patient search failures. Also, EHR data is well-known to be full of data errors, thereby making it very difficult to confidently locate the correct patient record, or records, every time.
Accurate, fault-tolerant search systems are a big improvement to finding patient records. Avant’s Enterprise Health Search (EHS) system works with any EHR to provide fault-tolerant search to confidently locate patient records even when there are many errors in the search query or even inside the EHR.