I think we’re all interested to see what kind of funding is going to be made available in the COVID-19 spending package that is happening. Tom Leary, VP Government Relations at HIMSS offered his suggestions on what COVID-19 healthcare funding might happen in our interview with him, but Ben Moscovitch, Project Director, Health Information Technology at The Pew Charitable Trusts has shared a possible $21 million in funding for a “Patient Lookup System” that could be included in a COVID-19 Supplemental:
The administration is asking for an extra $21M for @ONC_HealthIT to work on a “patient lookup system” via the #COVID19 supplemental.
Patient matching will be critical—we need organizations to be using more data & standard data for success. pic.twitter.com/4J2Krg8z1G
— Ben Moscovitch (@benmoscovitch) March 18, 2020
Genevieve Morris, a former ONC official who is currently running for congress in Maryland offered these added insights to the funding:
This is for an expansion of PULSE. It uses a centralized RLS but relies on the systems to return the right matches upon request. Will be interesting to see how the matching holds up outside of CA where it's been deployed before.
— Genevieve Morris (@HITpolicywonk) March 18, 2020
To date, all money for PULSE has gone to state agencies, like CALEMSA. They choose the vendor they work with and spend the dollars for the work. I would assume the $$ would continue to flow that way.
— Genevieve Morris (@HITpolicywonk) March 18, 2020
Many responded to this as pushing towards a national patient identifier. While this won’t lead to a national patient identifier and a national patient identifier would be impossible to implement in time to help with COVID-19, Ben Moscovitch aptly points out that “We need to enhance the use of demographic data (eg more of it and standards).” We can definitely see this crisis highlighting the issues with patient identification in healthcare.
