Health professor Neil Wenger was deep into a years-long study on seriously ill primary care patients when he uncovered a different but persistent issue: Many patients who were targeted for follow-up interventions had actually died, and their hospitals did not know about it.

It wasn’t what Wenger had set out to research. But it was unacceptable, he said, for health systems to lose track of seriously ill primary care patients who’d been treated on-site for years. To be clear, these were not one-time out-of-state patients who’d come in for a single visit.

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“When I found a bunch of them were dead and we didn’t actually know it, that’s when I said we need to describe it,” he said. “This is a cohort where we need to know about everyone who is dead.”

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