Gender Identity Medication Safety Issues

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Mary E. Burkhardt
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Joined: 02/27/2018 - 09:28
Gender Identity Medication Safety Issues

HI all,
I was wondering what other organizations are doing with patients' gender identity and the EMR. There is "birth sex" as listed on a patient's birth certificate. There is the Self Identified Gender Identity (SIGI) which may vary from the birth sex. Patients can go get a court order to change their birth sex in their medical record in situations where there is not a separate gender identity field in the EMR.

As you can imagine, this comes with lots of downstream impacts such as screening tests that don't flag correctly (Pap, Prostate labs etc.) issues with laboratory test interpretation, settings for clinical equipment (e.g. ventilators) and near and dear to my heart, drug dosing.

How does your organization manage this AND, is anyone aware of a TJC or national requirement to maintain the birth sex as part of information system integrity to prevent the above issues? (i.e. drive the salutations and mailings off the SIGI but the clinical information off of the birth sex).

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