What is MPI cleanup?
Master Patient Index (MPI) cleanup is the process of identifying and reconciling duplicate medical records within a healthcare provider’s electronic health record (EHR) system. It involves reviewing patient data stored in different locations and identifying if there are any duplicates or inconsistencies in names, addresses, dates of birth, or other relevant details. The process typically involves adding up-to-date information, removing inaccurate information, and merging duplicate records into one consolidated record to help reduce future duplication of medical records.
Definition
A Master Patient Index is the database that serves as the backbone of a healthcare organization’s patient identification and management system. It contains a comprehensive list of patients and their demographic and medical information, such as names, addresses, insurance details, and medical records. The MPI helps healthcare providers track and manage patient information across different care settings, ensuring continuity of care and preventing medical errors. It acts as a centralized source of patient information, enabling healthcare providers to quickly access and update patient records, view their medical histories, and monitor their health status. It is especially important that an MPI is able to reference and reconcile data from siloed databases for a complete picture of every patient so that healthcare providers don’t miss crucial information.
Data integrity
In healthcare, data integrity refers to the accuracy, completeness, and consistency of healthcare data throughout its lifecycle, from its creation and transmission to its storage, retrieval, and use during clinical decision-making. It is essential that healthcare data is processed, recorded, and communicated accurately and consistently to ensure that patients receive the appropriate medical care based on reliable information. The accuracy and completeness of the data contained within the MPI system are extremely important to maintaining data integrity. Having a clean MPI system can help eliminate duplicate records or inconsistencies in data, ensure accurate data entry, reduced clinical decision-making errors, and enhanced patient outcomes.
The Importance of an Efficient MPI
Having an efficient MPI is vital in maintaining the accuracy and consistency of healthcare data. A well-maintained MPI system indexes fragmented information for the same person and can link it together, improving the accuracy and completeness of records in an organization’s electronic health record (EHR) system and minimizing duplicate records. This allows healthcare providers to more reliably identify a patient’s complete medical history, allergies, or previous diagnosis that may impact their current course of treatment, leading to more effective care.
Benefits
Maintaining an effective MPI solution has many benefits for patients and providers across a health system, including:
- Improved accuracy and consistency of healthcare data: With an efficient MPI, healthcare providers can improve the accuracy and consistency of patient data by identifying and eliminating duplicate or erroneous records. This helps avoid errors in clinical decision-making and contributes to better patient safety and outcomes.
- Effective care coordination: A modern MPI system ensures that patient data and medical records are consistent across different healthcare facilities or systems, thus coordinating better communication and collaboration between healthcare providers. This helps to avoid situations where a patient’s records are lost or misplaced when transitioning between providers, enabling providers to make informed and efficient decisions regarding a patient’s care, and contributing to better outcomes.
- Reduced medical errors: Duplicated, incomplete, or erroneous patient records can increase the likelihood of medical errors, including incorrect diagnoses, incorrect drug dosages, or adverse outcomes. Efficient MPI solutions help to reduce these errors by enabling healthcare providers to have access to accurate and reliable patient information. This can help to improve the speed and accuracy of clinical decision-making and streamline other healthcare processes.
Legacy Solutions for Cleaning Up an MPI
Legacy solutions for cleaning up an MPI typically rely on manual methods which can be time-consuming, labor-intensive, and prone to errors. Such techniques involve searching for, analyzing, and merging duplicated patient records within an MPI solution. Manual methods could lead to missed duplicates or inconsistencies and increase the risk of data errors due to human error. Ideally, an MPI does not require regular cleanups to begin with and instead features an algorithm that can resolve identities even when they contain incorrect, incomplete, or inconsistent data.
How can Verato Help?
It’s our goal at Verato to make MPI cleanups a thing of the past. It’s time to stop performing regular cleanups of patient data with your master patient index (MPI) technology.
Whether you match and link your patient data between two records using the MPI module found in your EHR, or whether you use an enterprise master patient index (EMPI) technology, there is a powerful new technology called Referential Matching that you can simply “plug in” to your EHR or EMPI to automatically find and resolve its missed matches and duplicate records—eliminating the need to perform regular cleanups of your MPI. This simple plug-in can even work in real time to prevent duplicates from being created in the first place.
This plug-in is called Verato Auto-Steward™, and it works continuously—using Referential Matching technology to automatically find, identify, and resolve missed matches and duplicate records that even the most sophisticated EHR and EMPI technologies will never find. Verato Auto-Steward plugs into any EHR or EMPI technology, including those from Epic®, Cerner®, eClinicalWorks®, IBM® Initiate, Mirth®, and NextGate®.
Referential Matching technology isn’t simply a better algorithm—it is a completely new approach to patient matching technology that is a quantum leap more accurate than EHR and EMPI technologies.
Rather than directly comparing the demographic data from two patient records to see if those records match, Verato Referential Matching technology instead matches that record of 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 patients’ records to this database instead of to each other, Verato can make matches that conventional patient matching technologies could never make—even medical records containing demographic data that is out-of-date, incomplete, incorrect, or different.
Contact us to learn how we can help you prevent duplicates from being created with Verato Auto-Steward—enabling you to stop cleaning your MPI once and for all.