As data management in healthcare continues to become more complex, leaders across the care continuum are realizing that legacy identity solutions are no longer sufficient to support growth, digital enablement, interoperability, and other critical initiatives in a modern landscape.
What healthcare organizations really need is a solution that combines the capabilities of EMPI and MDM.
Unique challenges facing the healthcare industry
Healthcare organizations in the midst of digital transformation face particular challenges. In many cases, the surge in data volume leads to fragmented sources due to an increase in tools used, complicating access to crucial patient, member, consumer, and provider information. At the same time, involved workflows across departments necessitate shared data, with each team setting different data requirements. This poses challenges in optimizing care and operational outcomes.
Too often, data is managed in siloed environments by separate departments. The absence of a unified data source for various groups—patients, providers, consumers, and employees—creates strategic hindrances. Unfortunately, gaps, inaccuracies, and outdated data impede comprehensive insights, undermining better care provision and access to services. This hinders clinical decisions supported by patient data, underscoring the need for data accuracy, while healthcare’s highly regulated and security-sensitive nature heightens the importance of meticulous data management.
Existing solutions and what they lack
Confronted with a deluge of data and disparate systems, some healthcare organizations have turned to EMPI or MDM solutions to streamline and unite information about their patients, members, consumers, and providers. This is why healthcare leaders need a buyer’s guide with key considerations and a checklist to selecting the right identity data management solution to address their data needs now.
In short, EMPI and MDM solutions address some of the challenges healthcare organizations face—but they don’t meet all needs without extensive, additional work.
Enterprise Master Patient Index (EMPI): EMPI solutions tackle identity issues and manage clinical data for patients and members, ensuring accuracy and integration across systems. Unfortunately, existing EMPI solutions have hit a plateau in terms of matching accuracy. And while they can detect and reduce duplicate records in an EHR, they don’t natively incorporate third-party data.
Master Data Management (MDM) solutions: MDM solutions can manage data across several domains and link disparate information. However, generic MDM solutions are not built for the specific requirements healthcare organizations have, requiring extensive tuning and configurations.
Certain healthcare institutions have even gone the extra mile to launch separate MDM or other solutions (sometimes developed in-house) to independently handle provider data, covering individual practitioners and provider organizations.
As a result, the usual healthcare establishment ends up investing in multiple expensive systems from various vendors. These systems manage clinical data, consumer data, and provider data separately, using distinct point solutions.
A new way to manage healthcare data
Healthcare Master Data Management (hMDM) represents a reimagined approach to data management tailored to the needs of healthcare organizations. This solution integrates the advantages and features of EMPI, MDM, provider data management, and data enrichment solutions into a unified platform.
hMDM integrates the advantages and features of EMPI, MDM, provider data management, and data enrichment solutions into a unified platform.
An hMDM platform can match and manage the data of every person in a healthcare organization—including patients, members, providers, employees, and consumers—with one solution. The approach has several advantages:
When practitioners can see someone’s entire care journey, it improves the patient’s health outcomes; when outreach managers can see a person’s preferred contact methods, it improves patient engagement; and when a patient can easily find information about their care team, it improves patient satisfaction.
Your checklist for selecting the right identity solution for you
No matter what identity solution you choose, it should meet the following criteria to ensure you are prepared to face the challenges facing healthcare today:
Identity resolution
- Highest level of accuracy
- Native Referential Matching
- Match Tiers technology to safely incorporate less reliable data without affecting future match decisions
Data management
- Intuitive data stewardship workflow tools
- Data mastering
- Flexible data model
- Ability to manage multiple domains of data in one solution/platform
- Relationships between entities within and across domains
Data enrichment
- Social determinants of health (SDOH)
- Missing demographics and contact information
- Marketing and lifestyle data
- Provider data
- Enrichment data natively incorporated into the data management system andm atched to the appropriate identities
Activation
- Easy integration into the ecosystem of healthcare applications
- Cloud-first solution
- Data propagation upstream and downstream
- Enterprise analytics across all domains
Solution essentials
- Easy to implement and intuitive to use
- Fast time to value
- Highest levels of data security; has top industry certifications, e.g. HITRUST and SOC2
- Purpose built for healthcare specifically to support healthcare use cases and workflows
- Low maintenance: no hardware to procure or updates to install
- Predictable TCO: all costs covered in a single, annual subscription fee
- Performant: Modern architecture that grows with you, with no re-architecting
- Continuously monitored: Built-in auto-scaling, system alerting, utilization monitoring, and automated backups — all without your resources
The Verato Universal Identity™ platform is the industry’s first hMDM solution designed to manage patient, provider, consumer, and member data with one solution. To compare traditional identity management tools and determine if an hMDM solution could be right for you, read our buyer’s guide for healthcare leaders: “Making the business case for hMDM.”
