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What is health data integrity? Data integrity, or 'data quality,' refers to the process of maintaining the accuracy, reliability and consistency of data over its entire 'life-cycle.

Documentation integrity involves the accuracy of the complete health record. It encompasses information governance, patient identification, authorship validation, amendments and record corrections as well as auditing the record for documentation validity when submitting reimbursement claims.

It is vitally important to identify the correct patient for many reasons, including but not limited to patient safety, protection of privacy, and proper billing.

To prevent instances of misidentification and near-misses, The Joint Commission requires that two identifiers—such as a patient's full name, date of birth and/or medical identification (ID) number—be used for every patient encounter.

Throughout the healthcare industry, the failure to correctly identify patients continues to result in medication errors, transfusion errors, testing errors, wrong person procedures, and the discharge of infants to the wrong families.

Incorrect identification can result in wrong person, wrong site procedures, medication errors, transfusion errors and diagnostic testing errors.

Patient identifier options include: Name. Assigned identification number (e.g., medical record number) Date of birth. Phone number.

Patient identification is of the utmost importance for a doctor. It helps ensure that the patient's identity matches the treatment or service. Keep in mind that the proper procedure for patient identification is for your staff to ask patients to state their name and date of birth.