Crawl, walk, run: Three easy ways to solve patient matching at your organization

Patient matching is a huge challenge: up to 20% of patient records aren’t correctly matched within an organization and 50-60% of records aren’t matched when organizations exchange patient data.¹ And the costs of these missed matches are too high to ignore:

• Duplicate records cost health systems $96 per record to resolve²
• Repeated tests and delayed treatments caused by duplicate records cost another $1,100 per patient²
• Denied claims due to patient misidentification cost hospitals $17.4M per year²
• 86% of medical practitioners have witnessed or know of a medical error that was the result of patient misidentification²

The ONC is calling for a 0.5% duplicate rate in every healthcare organization by 2020. How can your organization achieve this impossible goal?

Surprisingly, the answer is not to alter your existing master patient index (MPI) by tweaking its algorithms, by adding more full-time employees to manually review records it flags as potential duplicates, or by enforcing stricter data governance rules across your organization. Instead, your organization should leverage a totally new technology in patient matching called Referential Matching.

Referential Matching is not just a new matching algorithm – it is a completely different and new approach. Rather than directly comparing the demographic data from two patient records to see if they match, Verato instead matches that demographic data to its comprehensive and continuously-updated reference database of identities. This proprietary database contains over 300 million identities spanning the entire U.S. population, and each identity contains a complete profile of demographic data spanning a 30-year history. It is essentially a pre-built answer key for all patient demographic data.

By matching records to this database instead of to each other, Verato can make matches that conventional patient matching technologies could never make—even patient records containing demographic data that is out-of-date, incomplete, incorrect, or different.

So how can your organization leverage Referential Matching technology? In three simple steps. Just crawl, then walk, then run.

1. Crawl: Use a Referential Matching diagnostic service to take an “X-Ray” of your EHR or EMPI technology to learn how many duplicate records it contains and what data issues are causing those duplicate records to be created. Contact us to learn more about this diagnostic service.
2. Walk: Deploy Verato Auto-Steward™, a simple cloud-based plug-in for your EHR or EMPI technology that automatically finds and resolves its missed matches and duplicate records using Referential Matching. Verato Auto-Steward can even automatically resolve the “potential duplicate records” your EHR or EMPI has flagged for manual resolution by HIM staff.
3. Run: Deploy the Verato Universal™ MPI, a HITRUST-certified SaaS EMPI solution that uses Referential Matching technology to match and link your patient records across your organization with the highest accuracy rates in the industry. Simply put, the Verato Universal MPI is the most accurate, most secure, easiest to implement, and most cost effective EMPI solution on the market—and you can deploy it in as little as six weeks.

Sources:
[1] CHIME: National Patient ID Challenge
[2] Ponemon Institute: 2016 National Patient Misidentification Report