<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><BillSummaries>
<item congress="117" measure-type="s" measure-number="217" measure-id="id117s217" originChamber="SENATE" orig-publish-date="2021-02-03" update-date="2021-05-18">
<title>Patient Matching Improvement Act of 2021</title>
<summary summary-id="id117s217v00" currentChamber="SENATE" update-date="2021-05-18">
<action-date>2021-02-03</action-date>
<action-desc>Introduced in Senate</action-desc>
<summary-text><![CDATA[<p><b>Patient Matching Improvement Act of 2021</b></p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p>]]></summary-text>
</summary>
</item>
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<dc:language>EN</dc:language>
<dc:rights>Pursuant to Title 17 Section 105 of the United States Code, this file is not subject to copyright protection and is in the public domain.</dc:rights>
<dc:contributor>Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress</dc:contributor>
<dc:description>This file contains bill summaries for federal legislation. A bill summary describes the most significant provisions of a piece of legislation and details the effects the legislative text may have on current law and federal programs. Bill summaries are authored by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) of the Library of Congress. As stated in Public Law 91-510 (2 USC 166 (d)(6)), one of the duties of CRS is "to prepare summaries and digests of bills and resolutions of a public general nature introduced in the Senate or House of Representatives". For more information, refer to the User Guide that accompanies this file.</dc:description>
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