An important part, and some say the only one thing that will give us true interoperability is trusted patient matching. When records come together from different systems, how do we really know they are actually the same patient? An issue that has long plagued the healthcare industry on all system fronts, from the payers, to the providers, to the hospitals, to the exchanges. For data to have integrity, one patient must have one longitudinal health record throughout the system. So how are we solving the challenge today? I have gathered up articles and resources from our network to answer that question. After all we are The Answers Network!
To Read
Member Data Matching Key To Risk Adjustment Program Success– By Stephanie St. Thomas, Director of Marketing, Verato
Poor patient (or member) matching plagues every single component of healthcare, often in different ways and with varying degrees of visibility into the problem. This article focuses on just one healthcare initiative that suffers from poor patient matching: your healthcare organization’s risk adjustment program. – Read the article.
National Patient Matching Framework Updated – The Sequoia Project announced the results of a multi-year effort of a diverse stakeholder workgroup to examine and revise best practices for patient matching between health information exchange partners. The revised whitepaper, entitled “A Framework for Cross-Organizational Patient Identity Management 2018,” is a multi-dimensional document featuring a matching maturity model, a detailed case study and specific practices for a national patient matching framework. Read the news.
MPI vs. EMPI: Comparing Patient Matching Value and Performance for the Healthcare Enterprise – By Gevik Nalbandian, Vice President of Software Engineering, NextGate
Patient matching issues that result in duplicate records cost hospitals $1.5M a year, at an average of $1,950 per patient, and the U.S. healthcare system over $6 billion annually, according to a new survey by Black Book Research. The poll of 1,392 health technology managers found that before implementing an enterprise master patient index (EMPI) for managing patient identification, duplicates accounted for 18 percent of an organization’s records. Respondents utilizing EMPI technology reported accurately identifying patients at the point of registration 93 percent of the time and at a rate of 85 percent for records shared outside the organization. Those hospitals not using an EMPI reported a match rate of just 24 percent when exchanging medical records with out-of-network providers. Read the article.
How Improving Patient Matching Can Improve Patient Satisfaction – By Stephanie St. Thomas, Director of Marketing, Verato
One of the biggest new product announcement splashes of this year so far was Apple’s announcement of a new Personal Health Record (PHR) — called Apple Health Records — which would allow users to aggregate their existing patient-generated data in the Health app with the data from their physicians’ EHRs, if those EHRs exist in a participating health system. This is an exciting step forward to giving patients control of their data, and most importantly may help proactive patients to improve their health by giving them easier visibility into their medical records. Read the article.
Download the White Paper
Moving Patient Matching Capabilities to the Cloud: How a cloud platform can improve patient data management
Today, the healthcare industry is much more comfortable moving its data and applications to a cloud platform. Consumer acceptance of cloud offerings has grown exponentially in conjunction with universal adoption of smartphones and mobile apps, critical to their daily lives. Healthcare is following: according to the HIMSS 2016 Survey, 84% of healthcare providers are currently using a cloud service. Get the Paper.
Listen
Josh Firstenberg, explains the role of Verato in the HIE space as a database master patient indexing technology, unifying patient data across various sources.
Shahzad Ahmad, VP Cloud Operations and Delivery of NextGate – Patient Matching and effectively managing your EMPI (Enterprise Master Patient Index) is a challenge for every healthcare organization. However, it also proves to be one of the most valuable things you can do to improve patient care in an organization.