April 24, 2023: MGMA and coalition partners urge Congress to repeal Section 510 in the Labor-HHS appropriations bill regarding Patient ID

April 24, 2023

Dear Senate and House Appropriations Leadership,

On behalf of the undersigned organizations, we urge you to reject the inclusion of outdated rider language in Section 510 of the Fiscal Year 2024 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education and Related Agencies (Labor-HHS) Appropriations bill that prohibits the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) from spending any federal dollars to promulgate or adopt a national unique patient health identifier standard.

For more than two decades, innovation and industry progress has been stifled due to a narrow interpretation of this language, included in Labor-HHS bills since FY1999. Without the ability of clinicians to correctly connect a patient with their medical record, lives have been lost and medical errors have needlessly occurred. These are situations that could have been avoided had patients been able to be accurately identified and matched with their records. This problem is so dire that one of the nation’s leading patient safety organizations, the ECRI Institute, named patient misidentification among the top ten threats to patient safety.


View the full letter to Senate Committee on Appropriations leadership
View the full letter to House Committee on Appropriations leadership