NCQA urges the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT to improve patient matching by working to establish unique patient identifiers

09.24.2020 · Eric Musser, Deputy Director, State Affairs, NCQA

Read NCQA's full comments to ONC on Patient Identity and Patient Matching.

"Improving patient matching is essential for patient safety, public health, and quality reporting for improvement and value-based payment models. All of these critical uses of clinical information depend on accurate patient identification and attribution.

Patient matching also is crucial for efforts by the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) and others to move to digital quality measures (dQM). Unlike traditional measures or electronic clinical quality measures (eCQMs), dQMs obtain needed data from an array of electronic sources, including electronic health records (EHRs), health information exchanges (HIEs), registries, claims, etc.

Because dQMs utilize so many different data sources, the potential for patient mismatching becomes even more problematic. Improved patient matching technologies is thus essential for the move to dQMs and better enable the ability to measure and improve healthcare quality."

Eric Musser, Deputy Director, State Affairs, NCQA

Eric Musser is the Deputy Director of State Affairs at the National Committee for Quality Assurance. He works with state regulators, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and other stakeholders to improve health care quality. Prior to joining NCQA, he was a health care administrator in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Eric holds a master's degree in public health from Emory University and a bachelor's degree in sociology and health policy administration from Penn State University.