Evaluation of real-world referential and probabilistic patient matching to advance patient identification strategy.

Referential patient matching, an increasingly popular method among health IT vendors, demonstrated notably greater accuracy than a more traditional probabilistic approach without the adaptation of the algorithm to the data that the traditional probabilistic approach usually requires. Health IT policymakers, including the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), should explore strategies to expand the evidence base for real-world matching system performance, given the need for an evidence-based patient identity strategy.