Patient Matching Improvement Act of 2021
Latest action · Feb 3, 2021 Read twice and referred to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.
Progress
Where this bill reached, and when. A stage with no date was not reached; one that failed a vote and later carried shows the date it carried.
- IntroducedFeb 3, 2021
- Passed SenateNot reached
- Passed HouseNot reached
- To the PresidentNot reached
- Became lawNot reached
Summary
Patient Matching Improvement Act of 2021
This bill requires the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) to standardize the format of postal addresses in health information technology to improve patient matching. Patient matching is the identification and linking of one patient's data within and across health care organizations using multiple demographic fields, such as name and address.
The ONC must collaborate with the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to make existing tools that automatically format addresses into a specific standard available to health care organizations. In particular, the ONC must focus on making the tools available to laboratories that test for COVID-19 (i.e., coronavirus disease 2019) to improve data collection related to that disease. If the USPS determines the tools cannot be made available to health care organizations, the Department of Health and Human Services must report to Congress on the barriers that prevent such use.
In addition, the ONC must update regulations to require the use of a standard address format as a condition of certification for health information technology.
Cosponsors 1
Members who signed on, in the order they did. All signed on Feb 3, 2021.
| Seat | Cosponsor | Signed on | |
|---|---|---|---|
| R-LA | Bill Cassidy | Original | Feb 3, 2021 |
Actions 2
Everything that happened, newest first.
- Feb 3, 2021Introduced in Senate
- Feb 3, 2021Read twice and referred to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.
Subjects
Assigned by the Library of Congress. Policy area: Health.
- Administrative law and regulatory procedures
- Cardiovascular and respiratory health
- Congressional oversight
- Department of Health and Human Services
- Emergency medical services and trauma care
- Health
- Health facilities and institutions
- Health information and medical records
- Infectious and parasitic diseases
- Medical tests and diagnostic methods
- Postal service
Text 1
Each version as it was printed, newest first.
- Feb 3, 2021Introduced in Senate
Everything here is as published by Congress: the summary is the Congressional Research Service's, the action wording is the clerks', and the subjects are the Library of Congress's. How far it got is read from the actions themselves, taking the most recent one of each kind, so a bill that failed a vote and later passed is shown as having passed. Records come from this bill on Congress.gov and govinfo.gov.