Abstract
Purpose :
Patient verification is a basic tenant in the delivery of medical care, as the failure to correctly identify patients can result in medication errors, testing errors, and potentially wrong person procedures. Patient misidentification is still revealed as a root cause of many medical mistakes. We hypothesize that monitoring patient verification practices and informing providers of their compliance with policy would improve adherence to patient verification protocol.
Methods :
All physicians and optometrists were instructed on the protocol of verifying patient name and date of birth at all patient encounters. Checkout clerks were instructed to conduct surveys with patients asking them if their provider verified their identifying information. After three weeks of data collection, providers were individually provided their adherence data and anonymized aggregate data was released to all clinical staff. Two more weeks of data collection ensued to assess the impact of intervention on adherence rates. To assess for maintenance of adherence an unannounced survey was conducted four weeks later.
Results :
Over a period of six weeks 8,883 patient surveys were conducted to assess adherence. Data was obtained about 71 different providers at five different sites. After the initial three weeks of surveying, adherence to the verification protocol was found to be 95.79%. Two more weeks of patient surveys showed a non-significant increase in adherence to 96.80%. The unannounced survey showed further non-significant increase in adherence [97.82%]. 53.3% of providers maintained the same level of adherence to protocol, while 33.3% improved their adherence and 13.3% had decreased adherence. Significant differences between ophthalmology sub-specialties and between providers were identified. During the six weeks of surveys there were no wrong-patient encounters.
Conclusions :
Patient verification is an important tenant of healthcare safety. Six weeks of patient surveys showed that completion of patient verification was initially very high. Intervention lead to a non-significant increase in adherence that was maintained when unannounced surveys were conducted.
This abstract was presented at the 2019 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Vancouver, Canada, April 28 - May 2, 2019.