Federal Guidelines For Standardized Patient Address Data

Project US@ was established by the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology to create standards for patient address information. The initiative leverages the expertise of the USPS®, the nation’s authority on addresses and related data quality standards. Project US@’s primary goal is to improve patient matching across healthcare’s broad spectrum of clinical and administrative processes, enhancing the performance of patient matching algorithms through improved address quality.

Click for Technical Specifications for Patient Addresses – Version 1

Determining if records correctly refer to a specific patient is critical to patient safety, whether the record is held within a single healthcare organization or across different healthcare organizations. By adopting Project US@, practice management platforms anticipate a reduced burden associated with developing and continuously working to improve patient query and matching efficiency, errors in de-duplicating patient records and billing, and other challenges.

Compliance Tools

Melissa supports compliance with the Project US@ federal data initiative to create a unified, industrywide specification for representing patient addresses.

Related: Melissa Supports Project US@ Data Compliance

Melissa’s Address Object and Personator tools are in compliance with the Project US@ Technical Specification for Patient Addresses Domestic and Military, Version 1.0. These products validate address information at the point of entry in patient registration and standardize address information according to USPS® guidelines. With Melissa’s support, practice management platforms can verify, standardize, and correct postal addresses with a USPS® CASS & Canada Post SERP Certified address engine, updating missing or incorrect information in real time.

Duplicates are matched and eliminated, meeting a critical goal of Project US@. This includes all-in-one verification and standardization capabilities that leverage a comprehensive dataset of billions of consumer records to validate that phone numbers, email addresses, social security numbers (SSN), and full names are valid and associated with a particular individual.

Related: How Project US@ Improves Patient Matching With Address Standardization

Melissa Supports Healthcare Practice Management Providers with Project US@ Data Compliance