Hello innovators!

As you know, we are in the critical home stretch for the National Patient ID Challenge. We were thrilled to see a number of submissions come in for the final innovation round, which officially closed on March 1.

We want to thank all the finalists for putting in the long hours to complete their work. Just to recap, innovators had to work through 44 use-case scenarios and answer detailed questions around enrollment and identification; security and fraud; management; privacy; scalability; adoptability and implementation. They were also asked to provide details on intellectual property and come up with a prototype development plan. Phew!

It’s a robust set of entries and we want to be sure we do our due diligence and give them the detailed review they deserve. All along, we’ve said that quality is our top priority. We want to identify a solution that will solve this critical patient safety problem. With that in mind, CHIME has adjusted the challenge timeline to ensure that both judges and innovators have adequate time to move through these final stages of review and prototype testing.

  • May 12: Finalists will be announced
    • Finalists will receive guidelines for the prototype stage of the challenge.
    • We’ll also schedule a webinar to provide a more detailed review of what’s expected.
  • June 30: Deadline to submit prototypes
  • July 1 – August 25: Prototype testing phase 1: enrollment & identification
  • September 1 – October 15: Prototype testing phase 2: privacy & security
  • Early November: Winner announced

There’s a lot of work ahead of us as we march toward naming a winner, but it’s important that we don’t lose sight of why we launched this challenge in the first place. ECRI Institute listed patient identification as one of its top 10 patient safety concerns for 2017. Citing its 2016 deep dive on the issue, ECRI noted that of 7,613 events analyzed, 9 percent resulted in patient injury, including two deaths. Imagine if you or a loved one were part of that 9 percent. Our goal is make sure that everyone is correctly identified when they seek care and that we eliminate this risk of patient harm.