Table 3.

Sample questions and recommendations to help HCOs get started with the Patient Identification SAFER guide.

Mitigation / Prevention	Key questions	SAFER recommendation	Key stakeholders
Mitigation	Can HCO assign a “temporary” unique patient IDs in the event that the patient registration system is unavailable or the patient cannot provide the required information?	There is a process to assign temporary IDs to newborns and unresponsive patients arriving at the Emergency Department; staff are trained to merge temporary records into permanent ones.	Medical records, clinicians, administration, IT
Prevention	Are users warned when they attempt to create a record for a new patient (or look up a patient) whose first and last names are the same or similar to another patient, or attempt to look up a patient and the search returns multiple patients with the same or similar names?	During the creation of a new patient record, a phonetic algorithm, such as Soundex, is used to display an alert or warning if the patient, or a patient with similar demographic data, exists in the system.	IT, Registration clerks, Medical records
Prevention	Does the HCO regularly monitor its patient database for patient identification errors and potential duplicate patients or records?	The EHR has a mechanism to run a report listing potential duplicate patient records (e.g., multiple records for patients with the same first and last names); once identified duplicate records are reviewed and merged.	IT, Medical records