What is a common challenge in patient matching across Care Everywhere?

• A. Excessively uniform identifiers
• B. Duplicates and inconsistent identifiers across sites
• C. Missing consent forms
• D. Too many unique patient records

Answer: (B)

Duplicates and inconsistent identifiers across sites create the biggest hurdle when matching patients across Care Everywhere. The goal is to link records from different health systems to one person, but when the same patient has multiple records or when each site uses its own identifiers (like different MRNs or local IDs), it becomes tough to know which records belong together. This fragmentation can lead to gaps in the patient’s history, duplicate data, or even incorrect data merges, which can affect safety and continuity of care.

Care Everywhere relies on matching algorithms that weigh multiple data points—name, date of birth, gender, address, and identifiers—to decide if records refer to the same person. When identifiers aren’t consistent across sites, the confidence in these matches drops, and more manual review or de-duplication is needed.

Other issues, like missing consent forms or simply having many unique records, are not the fundamental driver of matching difficulty. Missing consents affect access permissions, while the core challenge is how identifiers are shared and how duplicates are reconciled across institutions.