What would John Smith Say About Universal Patient Identifiers?

According to White Pages, there are currently about 25,255 people who are named John Smith in the United Sates. That’s a lot of John’s that could get mixed up with each other in all kinds of different systems, from their education history to their medical history. But mixing up one John Smith with another in terms of their medical history could potentially risk the lives of both John’s involved. So does that mean we should seriously consider implementing universal patient identifiers (UPIs)?

A recent Wall Street Journal Article outlines some of the arguments for and against UPIs so we want to sum it up for you.

www.names.whitepages.com

First, a definition of the UPI is just that we would create one number per person that would connect him/her to all of his/her medical records.

PROS
• Facilitates information sharing among doctors.
• Guards against unwanted medical errors.
• Makes it so that health records would never again have to be stored alongside financial data like Social Security numbers.
• Takes away the long and frustrating process of transferring a single patient's medical data from one health provider to another.
• Keeps the patient’s anonymous if they want – patient could choose to have no identifying data in their record.
• Allows for the creation of a new UPI if old one had been compromised. 

CONS
• Medical records are often collected and sold for commercial gain without patient consent – a UPI would just make this easier. History shows that universal IDs are used in originally unintended ways: Social Security numbers were supposed to be used only for payroll taxes, but now are universal IDs for health and commerce.
• More patients will lose trust in the system because of lack of privacy and would hide information from their doctors, which would result in deterioration in care.
• Government and corporations would want/need to build huge, centralized databases of health information, which would be big targets for data theft and abuse.
• UPIs would intensify the commoditization of patients.

So what should we do?
According to Dr. Deborah Peel, a psychiatrist and health-privacy expert in Austin, Texas, “The best way to share sensitive health information is to build electronic-records systems where patients are in control of their own medical records, not government and industry. Health professionals should seek permission to see personal data, but only patients should release or link it.”
On the other hand, Dr. Michael Collins, physician in internal medicine and chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Mass., states that “Congress should lift the ban on federal funding for UPI research, and we should better inform patients about the benefits of UPIs. No one wants medical data to fall into the wrong hands, but neither do we want patients to suffer because their medical information cannot be accessed.”

This is a very tough question; the pros and cons each have extremely valid points. So what do we at Inforia think? We think there needs to be a lot more research done into the question before we can even consider the option. Tell us what you think!