Improving Medical Device Safety by Collecting Unique Identifier Data

By Fred Donovan

July 23, 2019 - Including unique device identifiers (UDIs) on insurance claim forms will improve medical device safety, argued Ben Moscovitch, project director for health information technology at Pew.

By include these identifiers, faulty medical devices could be discovered more quickly. This will reduce the time for identification and recall of these problem devices, he observed in a blog post.

Collecting this data will not only improve patient safety but also reduce costs.

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Moscovitch cited a study that found as much as $1.5 billion in Medicare costs can be linked to only a few types of faulty cardiac devices.

Insurance claims data could be used to supplement data on device safety from electronic health records, providing a more comprehensive view on safety.

“For example, if a patient had sought treatment initially through a different health care system, the EHR would not capture that information. Because insurance claims can include data from multiple hospitals or offices, researchers could use them to find records of additional problems they might otherwise have missed,” he wrote.

Moscovitch said that a similar approach is currently used for medication. When a patient receives a drug, its unique identifier is entered on the insurance claim form. This population-level data is then used to determine whether a certain drug might cause unintended harm.

In a study conducted by Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania, and Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Massachusetts, researchers examined data from nearly 5,000 patients who received stents and more than 2,200 who had hip replacements. They tracked medical events within 90 days after the procedures occurred.

The researchers first examined data only from electronic health records and then added in claims data. When they added in the claims data, the researchers found a nearly fourfold increase in patients with a stent who were readmitted to a hospital with a possible stroke. For hip replacement patients, they found a 72 percent increase in the number readmitted to a hospital when claims data was included.

“The data show that insurance claims are a crucial source of information and can help reveal more widespread problems or trends. And this information, if used to evaluate medical device safety, could help determine whether certain types of products lead to higher risks of hospital readmissions, surgeries to revise an implant, or other complications,” Moscovitch concluded.

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Improving Medical Device Safety by Collecting Unique Identifier Data

Including unique device identifiers on insurance claim forms will improve medical device safety, argued Ben Moscovitch, project director for health information technology at Pew.

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