After nearly two years of work and a great deal of deliberation, CHIME Healthcare Innovation Trust has decided to suspend the National Patient ID Challenge. Though we’ve made great progress and moved the industry forward in many ways through the Challenge, we ultimately did not achieve the results we sought to this complex problem. We have consequently decided the best course for addressing this patient safety hazard is to redirect our attention and resources to another strategy.
We firmly believe that accurate patient identification is fundamental to patient care today and that innovation will lead to better, more affordable, more accessible and more equitable care. We set an extremely high standard in the Challenge requirements to make that vision a reality. While we’ve learned much through the Challenge process, there remains some distance yet to go to, and we feel a new approach is warranted to expedite the goal of achieving a nationwide patient identification solution. We commend the Challenge innovators for their commitment to improving healthcare and we encourage them to continue their work.
We also recognize that some of the regulatory barriers raised by Congress are becoming less of a hurdle. We are encouraged by recent decisions in Washington that signal a possible easing of restrictions on supporting a national a patient identification solution, but we also see these actions as incremental and far from sufficient to meet our goals.
As a leader in the healthcare IT community, it is our responsibility to drive necessary change. We remain committed to finding a national solution that accurately identifies a patient 100 percent of the time, and we will use our position as a leader to bring together key stakeholders and double down in our efforts. CHIME will assist in developing a multisector Patient Identification Task Force through CHIME Healthcare Innovation Trust, the CHIME affiliate that sponsored the CHIME National Patient ID Challenge. The task force will be one of several initiatives we will support to keep patient identification a top priority.
We will continue to lead, but we cannot do this alone. We will offer our experience, expertise and strong relationships with industry, innovators and policy makers to assemble a broadly representative team to address this problem. We need industry and government to join us with the same level of passion and commitment that our members show in their positions as CIOs and senior health IT executives.
Each day we lack a solution we put patients at risk. Together, through the Patient Identification Task Force and other collaborations, we will continue our efforts toward finding a solution and succeed at eliminating the risks and waste that result from patient misidentification.