New Senate bill takes aim at patient matching improvements, with help from the post office

Senators Maggie Hassan and Bill Cassidy have proposed the Patient Matching Improvement Act, which aims to improve patient identification and matching across healthcare providers. By making the United States Postal Service’s address-formatting tool available for use by healthcare providers, the legislation seeks to enable more accurate exchange of health information, particularly for contact-tracing efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic. The bill could facilitate tens of thousands of correct record linkages per day. The issue of patient record matching has gained urgency during the pandemic as it affects contact tracing and future vaccine administration efforts.