Why You Need the UPI

Patient Safety

  • Accurately and consistently identify patients, eliminating the potential for accidental (misspellings and key stroke errors) or deliberate (fraud) errors in patient records.
  • Prevent duplicate and overlap medical records by ensuring that multiple patient identifiers and records are not assigned to the same patient.
  • Prevent record overlays by ensuring that the same patient identifier (and therefore medical record) is not attributed to multiple patients.
  • Ensure correct patient matching within an institution and across nationwide exchange.

Patient Experience

  • Enhance the patient experience through faster, simpler, and more reliable and secure registration. Patients are easily confirmed at all points of care such as pharmacies, labs, etc.
  • Provide anonymity to the patient and their personal health record by de-identifying patient data, which neutralizes the data and protects it from unauthorized access during electronic record exchange.

Interoperability

  • Provide interoperability among disparate health information and EHR systems through a standardized patient identification and matching process.
  • Ensure the consistent, private and secure exchange of patient information within and across different settings of care.

Revenue Cycle Management

  • Enable a self-editing Master Patient Index and Enterprise Master Patient Index, thus avoiding the costs of record cleanup.
  • Reduce operating costs by significantly improving the accuracy of insurance claims submissions and putting in place tools that assist in lowering bad debt expense.
  • Substantially lower the costs resulting from duplicates, overlays and record overlaps.