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If You Use IBM Initiate, You Need to Read This

Thought Leadership

[Update: read this article on Modern Healthcare to learn why Healthix, the nation’s largest health information exchange with over 16M patients, is replacing its IBM® Initiate® EMPI with the Verato Universal™ MPI.] 


Given how critical it is to have integrated patient, provider, member, or consumer data, organizations across the country have invested millions of dollars implementing an IBM® Initiate® MDM or EMPI solution

These organizations have then spent millions of dollars more each year on hardware, maintenance, and upgrades, and then spent countless hours tuning Initiate’s algorithms each time they have integrated a new data source. 

On top of this, each of these organizations is also faced with thousands or millions of “potential duplicate records” that must be manually reviewed and resolved by data stewards or health information management (HIM) staff. These “potential duplicates” are flagged by IBM® Initiate for manual resolution whenever its algorithms cannot definitively determine whether two records match—often due to demographic data that is inconsistent between the two records (for example, one has a patient’s old address and maiden name, another has that patient’s new address and married name). 

If you use IBM® Initiate® as your MDM or EMPI, your organization is not an exception. You are spending millions of dollars a year on hardware, maintenance, upgrades, and algorithmic tuning cycles. And you either have a large staff reviewing and resolving potential duplicates, or you have thousands or millions of duplicates accumulating without any plan to resolve them. Left unresolved, these duplicates drastically impact your organization’s operations, business results, and ability to provide exceptional service to your patients, members, or customers. 

Luckily, Verato offers cloud-based Referential Matching solutions that can dramatically reduce your duplicates, reduce your costs, and improve your patient, member, or consumer matching. 

  1. The Verato Universal Identity™ platform is the industry’s first hMDM, an MDM platform built for the specific needs of healthcare organizations.  Built around Verato UMPI, the comprehensive platform can manage patient, provider, and consumer data with one solution. As a cloud-native service, the Verato Universal Identity platform deploys quickly, integrates seamlessly, and scales effortlessly. 
  1. The Verato Universal™ MPI is a HITRUST-certified SaaS EMPI solution powered by Referential Matching technology. Simply put, the Verato Universal MPI is the most accurate, easiest to implement, most secure, and most cost-effective EMPI solution on the market that can be fully deployed in as little as six weeks. Read this article on Modern Healthcare explaining why Healthix, the largest HIE in the country with over 16M patients, decided to replace IBM® Initiate® with the Verato Universal MPI. 
  1. Verato Auto-Steward™ is a cloud-based plug-in for MDM and EMPI products that uses Referential Matching technology to automatically find and resolve your MDM’s or EMPI’s missed matches and duplicate records—without disrupting any existing processes or IT systems. Verato Auto-Steward can even automatically resolve the “potential duplicate records” that your MDM or EMPI has flagged for manual resolution. Plug Verato Auto-Steward into IBM® Initiate® to improve its matching, reduce its duplicates, and maximize the return on investment (ROI) of your IBM® Initiate® implementation by slashing your data stewardship and manual duplicate resolution costs. 

Learn more about the Verato cloud-based Universal Identity platform, an MDM platform purpose-built for healthcare, Verato Auto-Steward, which can plug into IBM® Initiate® to make it better, and the Verato Universal MPI, the new best-in-class EMPI solution. 

Disclaimer: IBM® and IBM Initiate® are trademarks or registered trademarks of IBM Corporation. Verato is not affiliated with IBM Corporation.

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