This post is part of our Identity First. Everything Follows. blog series, in which we explore our response to CMS’s 2025 RFI in partnership with Snowflake.
In modern healthcare, operational efficiency is critical to sustaining care delivery in an environment of tightening margins and escalating demands. However, while many organizations focus on staffing, equipment, or the supply chain as the key drivers of efficiency, one of the most persistent and costly sources of waste is often overlooked: fragmented identity data.
When patient identity information is incomplete, inaccessible, or incorrect, frontline teams across every department, from scheduling and admissions to billing and care coordination, must perform avoidable, manual tasks to compensate for data failures. Time that should be spent supporting patient care gets wasted on re-entering information, resolving mismatches, and hunting for missing records.
These inefficiencies may seem like minor annoyances. But across thousands of encounters, every duplicated record and mismatched identity compounds, creating substantial operational drag:
- Patients are forced to verify basic information multiple times in a single visit.
- Registration teams manually resolve duplicate entries.
- Call centers reroute patients after identity failures block proper call handling.
- Billing teams waste hours correcting denials triggered by identity mismatches.
This creates an operational bottleneck.
For leaders seeking to improve operational efficiency in healthcare, addressing identity fragmentation is foundational. It’s the first step toward reducing waste, improving patient flow, and enabling sustainable growth.
How identity fragmentation drives operational waste
Fragmented identity data creates daily, tangible disruptions across nearly every operational workflow in healthcare.
Every time a health system fails to accurately match a patient record, a series of inefficiencies cascade through its clinical and administrative processes:
- Frontline staff are forced to manually confirm patient details at intake or registration, often checking multiple systems to reconcile discrepancies. This slows check-in processes, extends wait times, and frustrates both staff and patients.
- Call center agents spend precious time revalidating identity data before they can answer simple account or appointment questions. Worse, misrouted calls caused by mismatched patient records drive up average handling times and require repeat calls to resolve.
- Billing teams process duplicate claims when systems misclassify multiple identities as separate patients. This results in unnecessary denials, rework, and delays in revenue cycle operations.
- Care coordinators are left searching multiple disconnected systems to locate the correct patient record, especially after external referrals, emergency visits, or care transitions between departments. This wastes staff time and increases the risk of clinical errors.
And these aren’t isolated incidents. They’re the daily operational reality for hospitals, outpatient clinics, and payer organizations—all struggling with identity fragmentation.
At scale, the impact of duplicate medical records in healthcare translates to:
- Higher administrative labor costs due to redundant manual work.
- Longer patient wait times that lead to lower satisfaction scores.
- Increased call center handling times and operational delays.
- Revenue cycle slowdowns occur as billing errors triggered by identity mismatches force reprocessing.
- Staff frustration and burnout, as workers are burdened with avoidable data correction tasks instead of value-added care activities.
Each misidentified patient record is a source of measurable operational waste, silently eroding both staff productivity and financial performance. This disconnected identity data compounds cost and inefficiency across every corner of the organization.
Why operational efficiency requires trusted identity data
To achieve operational efficiency in healthcare, organizations must resolve identity where it starts. Because when identity data is unified in a master data management (MDM) solution purpose-built for healthcare,
- frontline staff spend less time verifying patient records and more time focusing on care.
- call centers route patients correctly, reducing average handle times.
- routine workflows, from claims submission to prior authorization, flow seamlessly without manual intervention.
- automated systems (appointment reminders, billing, referrals) function reliably, without duplicate triggers or missed communications.
Consider a hospital’s emergency department: Without trusted identity data, staff manually verify patients using multiple, disconnected systems. Intake slows, errors multiply, and wait times grow.
With accurate, real-time identity management, the system retrieves the correct record immediately, accelerating registration and minimizing patient frustration.
A unified identity connects systems and eliminates friction from everyday operations. It improves both staff efficiency and patient experience. Operational excellence starts with identity clarity.
How Verato helps healthcare organizations cut waste
At Verato, we help healthcare organizations cut waste at its root cause: identity fragmentation.
Legacy master data management healthcare tools rely on rigid matching algorithms, but Verato Referential Matching® is powered by a continuously updated national dataset. This allows us to improve data quality and efficiency by resolving identities accurately, even when demographic data is incomplete, inconsistent, or outdated.
This means eliminating manual data entry duplication and automating workflows from call routing to claims processing. Staff burden and administrative overhead are reduced, while patient experience overall is enhanced through faster, smoother interactions.
Schedule a demo today to see how Verato streamlines operations and accelerates patient care.
