The practice of engaging the patient in identifying themselves and using two patient identifiers (full name, date of birth and/or medical ID number) is essential in improving the reliability of the patient identification process.

Approved patient identifiers: Items of information accepted for use in patient identification, including patient name (family and given names), date of birth, gender, address, medical record number and/ or Individual Healthcare Identifier.

Identifiers can be the patient's name, an assigned identification number, a telephone number or another person-specific identifier. A patient's room number or physical location is not considered an acceptable identifier.

This can be done with any 3 of the patient identifiers, which include: the patient's full name, date of birth, address, or their hospital or Medicare number. This helps to reduce the risk of providing care to the wrong patient.

Prevention. To prevent instances of misidentification and near-misses, The Joint Commission requires that two identifiers—such as a patient's full name, date of birth and/or medical identification (ID) number—be used for every patient encounter.

Medicare beneficiary identifiers (MBI) are a standard patient identifier for Medicare patients across the United States. These patient identifiers are submitted with patient-level data to CMS for quality measure reporting, both for eCQMs and for claims-based measures.

Acceptable identifiers may be the individual's name, an assigned identification number, telephone number, date of birth or other person-specific identifier." Use of a room number would NOT be considered an example of a unique patient identifier.