The Trillion-Dollar Problem of Not Knowing Who You Are

Every time a patient walks into a new doctor's office, hospital, or lab, the healthcare system commits an act of quiet inefficiency.  That person is assigned a new local identifier, disconnected from every other identifier already attached to them elsewhere. Multiply that across a lifetime of care, and a patient's data ends up scattered across records that no one can reliably stitch back together. This is the cost of not having a national patient identifier, and it is far larger than most people realize.