November 3, 2016 Washington, DC — eHealth Initiative (eHI), an independent non-profit membership organization whose mission is to drive improvements in healthcare through innovation and information technology, today announced that Verato, Inc., a leading provider of cloud-based patient matching solutions, has become its newest member.
“Verato brings a level of expertise around patient identity resolution and patient matching that will help the healthcare industry solve the challenges of interoperability and patient data sharing,” said Jennifer Covich Bordenick, CEO of eHI. “They bring a next-generation patient matching technology solution to market. We look forward to having them at the table as our members discuss how to solve the most pressing challenges facing the healthcare industry using innovative new approaches.”
To match and link patient records across healthcare systems, Verato uses its extensive database of US identities as a universal “answer key” for names, addresses, birthdates, and other identifying attributes. Using this answer key, Verato can make a match even if two patient records contain different identity attributes for the same person—for example, due to address changes, name misspellings, or incorrect birthdates.
“As a company, we are focused on solving the challenges that surround the second phase of achieving interoperability,” said Mark LaRow, CEO of Verato. “Phase one is establishing standards that ensure multiple organizations are speaking the same language on a data and technical level. But, phase two will be ensuring that multiple organizations are speaking the same language on a patient level. We call this ‘identity interoperability’ and look forward to working with eHI and its members to bring visibility into this important issue.”
Identity interoperability is quickly becoming a ubiquitous challenge for healthcare organizations. CHIME estimates that there is currently a 50-60% error rate in identifying the same person across organizations. This error rate must dramatically decrease for other strategic healthcare initiatives like ACOs, Precision Medicine, and the consumerization of healthcare to be effective. With the help of its members, eHI is poised to help drive solutions within the healthcare industry towards achieving identity interoperability.
About eHealth Initiative
eHealth Initiative (eHI) is a Washington DC-based, independent, non-profit organization whose mission is to drive improvements in the quality, safety, and efficiency of healthcare through information and information technology. eHI is the only national organization that represents all of the stakeholders in the healthcare industry. Working with its membership, eHI advocates for the use of health IT that is practical, sustainable and addresses stakeholder needs, particularly those of patients. Find out more at www.ehidc.org.
About Verato
Verato offers a cloud-based patient matching platform that links and matches patient records across disparate databases or organizations with the highest accuracy rates in the industry. Verato leverages an extensive self-learning database of US identities as a universal “answer key” for identity data. Using this database as a reference, Verato links and matches patient records 15 times better than existing technologies. And because it is cloud-based, the Verato platform is less expensive, faster to implement, and more scalable than traditional data quality, data integration, and Master Patient Index (MPI) solutions. The Verato platform can act as a standalone MPI, or can be used to quickly and easily boost the matching performance of large MPI implementations. Verato is based in McLean, VA.