This post is part of our Identity First. Everything Follows. blog series, in which we explore our response to CMS’s 2025 RFI in partnership with Snowflake.
Data exists everywhere in today’s healthcare environment, but the ability to connect it is what makes it meaningful.
Clinicians rely on a full picture of a patient’s health status to deliver high-quality, timely, and personalized care. Yet patient identity fragmentation remains one of the most persistent and overlooked barriers to improving outcomes.
Across the country, health systems are grappling with data scattered across siloed EHRs, partner organizations, and community platforms. When patient identity isn’t consistent across systems, it creates downstream effects: diagnoses are delayed, redundant tests are ordered, important follow-ups are missed, and social determinants of health (SDOH) insights go unaddressed.
These gaps are both administrative and clinical. And they don’t just affect technology workflows; they affect patients.
Solving this problem requires a shift in thinking. Patient identity must be treated not as critical clinical infrastructure but as a shared, trusted foundation for every system, provider, and care partner.
Fragmented patient identity leads to fragmented care
The promise of interoperability in healthcare depends on trust in the underlying identity data. But today, clinicians routinely face fractured patient histories and incomplete care narratives because the identity layer is broken.
Instead of a single, reliable patient record, clinicians are presented with fragmented data stitched together from multiple systems. And each system may have a slightly different name, date of birth, address, or identifier for the same person.
Consider these real-world challenges:
- A primary care provider refers a patient for a specialty consultation, but because the specialist’s system doesn’t correctly match the patient’s identity, the consult notes never make it back to the primary care EHR.
- A specialist prescribes a new medication, unaware of a recent allergy documented in a duplicate record from an earlier hospitalization.
- A community health worker provides transportation or nutrition support to a high-risk patient, but the data never integrates into the clinical record. This leaves physicians unaware of these critical SDOH interventions.
As a result, organizations are left with the fallout caused by incomplete care, redundant testing, and preventable errors. What’s worse: they force clinicians and care managers to spend time tracking down the truth instead of caring for the patient.
The takeaway is simple: fragmented identity = fragmented care.
Whole-person care demands a complete patient identity view
Improving patient outcomes starts with connecting the right data to the right person, every time. A comprehensive patient identity view enables personalized, whole-person care.
When identity data resolution is done right, it unlocks the ability to:
- Access full medical histories across care settings, regardless of where services were delivered.
- Integrate SDOH directly into clinical workflows to enable proactive care planning that addresses barriers such as housing, food insecurity, or transportation gaps.
- Coordinate effective post-discharge care, ensuring that follow-up services, medications, and recovery plans reach the patient with the necessary support.
For example:
- A patient recovering from cardiac surgery is discharged home but lives alone and lacks mobility. Unified identity data connects the hospital’s discharge planning with a community transportation program and a home health nurse. This results in fewer missed visits, lower readmission risk, and a faster recovery.
- A patient with diabetes receives food assistance and education through a non-clinical SDOH partner. That engagement data is linked to their clinical record through identity matching, alerting the care team to reinforce nutritional coaching during office visits.
This is whole-person care in action. And it’s only possible when patient identity is resolved across both clinical and non-clinical systems.
Why the right MDM solution powers better health outcomes
A master data management (MDM) solution is the gold standard for realizing a 360-degree view of every person in your ecosystem. Unlike other solutions, MDM for healthcare can do more than connect systems — it unifies identity across the entire care ecosystem, from multi-EHR environments to partner HIEs, payer systems, and community-based SDOH programs. Every record, from every source, references the same trusted identity.
To achieve this, an MDM solution must:
- Resolve identity despite demographic errors. Even if a patient’s name is misspelled, their address has changed, or other details are outdated, matching should remain accurate.
- Bridge disconnected data sources. Care continuity shouldn’t depend on system integration alone; the solution must resolve identity across organizations that would otherwise remain siloed.
- Synchronize clinical and non-clinical systems. Data from hospitals, food banks, behavioral health partners, or remote monitoring tools should all flow back to the correct patient.
- Enable improved analytics and reporting. With complete and accurate identity data, analytics teams can uncover deeper insights, track outcomes more precisely, and identify population health trends with confidence.
- Support continuous data enrichment. The solution should enhance records with authoritative, external data sources to fill in gaps and keep patient profiles current.
With these capabilities in place, healthcare organizations can:
- Build longitudinal views of care across all settings
- Integrate SDOH and community engagement data directly into clinical workflows
- Ensure post-discharge outreach reaches the right patient
- Reduce disparities, readmissions, and care delays
Verato is the only healthcare-specific identity platform that delivers all of this at scale. Powered by Verato Referential Matching® and a continuously updated national dataset, Verato ensures every system is working from the same trusted identity to make whole-person care possible.
Schedule a demo to see how Verato can help you unify data, empower care teams, and deliver better results for every patient you serve.
