Current Joint Commission standards call for the use of two patient identifiers to avoid mixing up patients with the same or similar names. For inpatients, these identifiers are usually the name and the medical record number (MRN).
Which is fine if the only place you need to identify the patient is your own hospital.
But your hospital’s MRN is meaningless to me and my EHR.
So if you send me a copy of my patient’s chart (or her lab result or mammogram report) and all that’s listed on the top of the page is her very common name and your MRN, I have no clue who this patient is.
(My EHR gives me a box to check to confine the search to my own patients, but that button only works about 10% of the time.)
So please, hospitals, start adding the patient’s date of birth to your printed reports and records. And EHR vendors, you could make it easier for all of us by defaulting to a header that includes the date of birth as an identifier.
Thank you.
I have a female relative who was named for an Aunt, and as adults, they both had the same exact name, and shared a doctor, and on more than one occasion, the doctor’s office and/or the mammography place got confused. After the first time, the relatives weren’t terrified, and made them double check the birthdates, and voila, no panics about how changed the mammograms were from the time before.
I thought DOB’s were routine for medical reports!