The Right ID: How Patient Matching Can Support Better Care

Once the pandemic hit, patients might be admitted in one hospital and have their vital information recorded, only to be transported across town once they were diagnosed with COVID-19. The health system struggled with slow diagnoses and was wasting time on tracking down and reentering vital information.

This optimized patient matching technology addressed two challenges that tend to come up with patient matching. First, it removed the need for time-consuming human interventions to match data. Second, it removed the risk of undermatching that comes from applying rudimentary matching rules. As Murray puts it, “If you’re undermatching patients, you’re not providing them the best possible treatment because they’re showing up at another hospital and their vitals aren’t there.”

The game-changing success of the COVID-19 diagnosis tool helped demonstrate the usefulness of the patient matching system and has driven the health system to explore additional use cases.