The importance of record matching and advanced data management for public health
The pandemic shone a spotlight on our nation’s underfunded and aging public health infrastructure. Now, as public health agencies across the nation endeavor on a massive modernization effort, it is time to build a modern solution with a solid foundation. One key area that the pandemic highlighted was a lack of matching or linking records for the same person within a system and across the ecosystem. This resulted in fragmented records with data for the same person scattered across the ecosystem. Critically, missed links across the enterprise and unresolved duplicate records within systems undermine data integrity and skew downstream analytics and reporting.
In a recent eHealth Initiative survey, 83% of public health agencies reported struggling with record matching and person identity challenges, 100% agree that identity matching creates operational challenges, however, 0% were highly confident in their current matching solution.
- It has never been more important to link a person’s immunization records to incoming disease surveillance cases, or link cases to chronic disease registries.
- It is also vital that public health agencies be able to link their data with data from HIEs and hospital systems to gain more insights about the patients.
- Accurately identifying persons across all disparate systems is foundational for analytics and reporting. With correct data and accurate statistics so vital for public health activities, having a complete and trusted view of all the person’s data is the critical first step. For example, if there is a missed link between the immunization and disease surveillance systems, staff will not know that new COVID case is a breakthrough infection. Duplicate records within the immunization system cause fragmented data that can make vaccine series look incomplete because later doses are on different records.
Innovative health agencies lead the way
Verato has been working with innovative health and human services agencies for almost a decade. Today, the Verato Universal Identity™ Resolution platform spans the nation, helping over a dozen states and counties finally see the whole picture by linking and matching records across the public health ecosystem. Here are just a few examples of how state and local governments are using Verato to solve the problem that drives everything else — knowing who is who™.
- In a large Mid-Atlantic state, Verato is helping link person records across all the public health systems.
- One of the largest counties in Virginia and one of the largest counties in California each utilize Verato’s platform to link public health and human services records together.
- A Pacific Northwest state turned to Verato for help very early in the pandemic and initially used Verato for only its pandemic-related response but now is expanding into other health and human services use cases.
- A gulf-coast state is deploying Verato to link clinical data to Medicaid and other human services.
- A western-mountain state worked with Verato and their HIE to link records and even found nearly 17,000 kids who were missing out on support services that they were eligible for.
Ensure your public health information systems are ready
As you plan for your data modernization projects within your organization, ensure it is built on a solid foundation with enterprise-wide identity resolution at its core. Incorporating an industry-leading identity resolution solution – that combines the world-class match accuracy and stewardship experience of an enterprise master person index (EMPI) with the advanced data management and analytics features of a master data management (MDM) solution – is vital to ensure you are prepared for the challenges today and in the future.
Schedule some time with the identity experts at Verato to learn how to incorporate an identity resolution solution in your modern public health information ecosystem.
