Bipartisan Senators Join Forces to Improve Medical Records

Improving Healthcare with a bill submitted to the Senate is a top priority for a group of senators made up of bipartisan representatives. The bills initial goal is to be able to accurately match the records of patients in order to increase the benefit to those affected by the Coronavirus. Contact tracing is a large part of accurate data on the Coronavirus impact and without it, healthcare providers and Coronavirus task forces cannot give the best aid and information on medical transcription.

The increase in aid comes through the US Postal Service. The bill would require new formatting of addresses and basic contact information. This would make it much easier for hospitals and testing laboratories to categorize patient records more accurately. This categorization would be processed through the hospital and testing laboratories IT systems.

A large majority of retailers already utilize this formatting on their online sites. The new formatting would actually increase the number of patient records results by a huge margin. Tens of thousands of medical transcription would be available electronically and this increase would be a daily increase. Typically, errors in patients information are the main reason this number of patient records cannot be accurately processed.

Senator Maggie Hassan claims that lives would be saved by utilizing the postal service formatting. This would give providers of healthcare easy access to these tools. She goes on to say that the legislation they want to introduce should be a part of the coming COVID-19 Aid package. This kind of updated patient record process would require a significant amount of money that could be justified in the coming COVID-19 relief package, which would in turn help a large number of patients affected by the virus.

Patient Matching Improvement Act

The bill is called the Patient Matching Improvement Act. Hassan was joined by Senator Bill Cassidy when formatting the bill. Senator Bill Cassidy is a Republican Senator and Maggie Hassan is a Democrat Senator.

The bill’s formation actually began when both Senators sent a letter to Secretary Alex Azar. in the letter, they push for the Department of Health and Human Services to join with USPS in utilizing this formatting tool for patients’ addresses and basic contact information.

Many patients are not able to be matched up to their records due to human error. Almost 50% of the time these records are flawed.

Oftentimes, because of these mistakes, patients are mixed up with each other and this creates a decrease in the ability to contact trace and thereby decreasing Coronavirus relief.

Hassan also says there are two main factors that need to be acted upon before the country can open up. She says that contact tracing for people infected with the Coronavirus must be as accurate as possible. Secondly, she believes an overarching plan to introduce the vaccine to the population must be implemented.

Though it may seem like accurately recording basic contact information is a very simple task, this information more often than not contains many errors. Effective Coronavirus relief starts with correct names on hospital records and correct phone numbers.