Health and Human Services is encouraging healthcare providers, public health agencies and other organizations to consider new data standards for recording patient addresses in healthcare.

Released on Friday by the Office of the National Health Information Technology Coordinator The final version of the project [email protected], a technical specification intended to serve as an industry data standard for patient addresses. ONC has been working on projects [email protected] Cooperate with standards development and health IT organizations Start this work in early 2021.

ONC officials stated that they encourage state and federal agencies, public health organizations, payers, health IT developers, research organizations, and healthcare providers to consider implementing the project [email protected] standard.

While healthcare facilities need to be able to exchange data on patients’ current and previous addresses, each ONC’s data sharing rules, they don’t need to use a specific format to do so.

This is considered a factor in the healthcare industry Ongoing patient matching issues. Patients typically share their names, dates of birth, and other demographic information with the registrar prior to their visit so that it can be matched with their existing medical records. However, subtle inconsistencies in how information is recorded can complicate the process.

According to ONC, if organizations use the same data standards for demographic data such as addresses, this is expected to help more accurately match patients with their medical records, as well as match medical records of different provider organizations.

Patient matching is critical to interoperability because hospitals cannot share medical records with each other if they cannot determine the appropriate records to share.

“Standardized patient addresses may seem like a trivial matter, but that’s why this work is so important,” said Steve Posnack, deputy national coordinator of ONC Health IT, in a meeting. Press Releases. “If implemented at scale, improving the accuracy and consistency of addresses would have a significant impact.”

this project [email protected] Standards developed by ONC in conjunction with standards development organizations such as Health Level 7, the National Prescription Drug Programs Council, and X12 describe how parts of a patient’s address, such as address numbers and street names, should be formatted and abbreviated, and what special characters can be used.

ONC will continue to work on the project [email protected] 2022, including guidance on tribal communities, geolocation data, and provider and facility addresses.

ONC also released on Friday “Companion Guide“Best practices and guidelines for capturing and managing patient address data, developed in partnership with the American Health Information Management Association.