CHIME announces finalists for $1M National Patient ID Challenge

Finding a solution to the problem of misidentification is critical to patient safety, says Liz Johnson.


Four finalists are advancing to the prototype testing round of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives’ $1 million National Patient ID Challenge, aimed at developing a solution that ensures 100 percent accuracy of every patient’s health data to reduce preventable medical errors.

Correctly identifying patients remains a daunting challenge for healthcare organizations, with misidentification negatively impacting patient care. Patient identification ranked third overall in ECRI Institute’s 2017 list of the top 10 patient safety concerns.

“The time is now to solve this problem,” said Liz Johnson, chair of CHIME’s board of trustees and chief information officer for acute care hospitals and applied clinical informatics at Tenet Healthcare. “Our patients deserve better and the CHIME Healthcare Innovation Trust National Patient ID Challenge has presented the industry with a great opportunity to address this serious patient safety issue in our healthcare system. We know that a workable solution exists, and we are thrilled to announce that four worthy solutions will proceed to the prototype testing round.”

Also See: ONC launching Patient Matching Algorithm Challenge

Selected by a panel of independent judges, the four challenge finalists include:
  • Michael Braithwaite, founder and CEO of biometrics development vendor Personavera, for his proposal to achieves patient identification through the use of multiple biometric technologies.
  • Bon Sy, a computer scientists and electrical engineer who specializes in biometrics security and privacy, whose solution identifies patients by analyzing a combination of behavioral and biometric information.
  • Team HarmonIQ Health System, a workflow and analytics solutions vendor, whose submission leverages blockchain, public ledger, FHIR and encryption and hashing technologies to identify patients.
  • Team RightPatient, a biometric patient identification company, based on a proposal that taps into photos, biometric third-party and other data, to enable patient identification.
The prototype testing stage of CHIME’s challenge has two distinct phases: enrollment and identification, as well as privacy and security. Ultimately a winner will be announced by CHIME in November.


CHIME’s testing partner for the prototype testing phase of the challenge is Modulus, a medical device manufacturing company. In particular, Modulus says it has extensive experience in designing and manufacturing Class II and Class III medical devices.

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