Healthcare runs a 1980s model in 2026 | Aaron Miri, Baptist Health

Erin, what is your take on national pet patient identifiers? I will tell you my bias, very pro.

I don't understand why we don't just give patients their own unique ID.

It could be, you know, a number like your social security number and you type that in, like in my ideal vision of the future, you arrive to an ER.

You go into some kind of, you know, maybe it's a little box of some kind.

I don't know.

The designers can figure it out.

You type in your number.

That's your unique patient ID.

And then up pops your entire medical history and background, regardless of where you've lived in the world, what health system you've gone to.

It's all there.

And the triage is happening by the AI.

Do I need to be seen in this ER? Do I need to immediately pop on a telehealth call? Should I go home and wait it out? What is the right next step for me? I think at that point you can start to just reduce the numbers immediately.

But we've been trying to do this for years.

It hasn't happened.

There is support behind it in certain circles.

What do you think?

Absolutely.

So my personal take on it is that this is a long time needed identifier in the health care industry.

I mean, let's let's talk basics.

You know, there have been numerous studies put out by the Rand Institute and others of the tens of thousands of injuries that occur, some severe because we misidentified the patient.

You ask any health system how many Maria Garcia's are in your health system or John Gonzalez or whatever, Jane Smith.

You have hundreds of them.

It is human nature, especially in a crisis triage situation, you could inadvertently pick the wrong patient because there is no universal patient ID.

It's even worse, like someone for me who went from Dallas, Texas to Boston to Austin, now here in Jacksonville, I've got four medical records that got to merge, right? Sometimes when you do merges, those records create what I call overlays or duplicates because they're wrong patient merge because your name is similar.

There's all sorts of issues that add cost, add waste, and add harm to the health system because we have not identified and really objectified a universal patient identifier in this country.