Healthcare organizations often face challenges in managing patient, consumer, member, and provider identities across their enterprise, especially as the rapid growth in digital initiatives and expanding service lines means patients have multiple touchpoints outside of the primary electronic health record (EHR).
During a recent focus group consisting of Verato customers who use Epic® as their EHR, industry leaders shared insights on how integrating Verato with Epic® and other systems helped support key initiatives and maximized their investment.
Understanding the complete patient journey across Epic® and the rest of the enterprise
During the focus group, the director of the data warehouse team at a large health system in Texas discussed how they have been able to build a complete, 360-degree view of each patient in their data warehouse. They load data from Epic® and 15+ additional sources — some internal, some from external data feeds — into their data warehouse and use Verato to tie all of the correct data to the correct patient. This enables them to understand every touchpoint that each person has across their health system. They also use Verato to enrich their view of each person with additional socioeconomic and lifestyle attributes.
The 15+ integrated data sources in their data warehouse include marketing sources, enabling them to power marketing campaigns — for example, targeting new movers in their service area. Being able to tie the marketing data to their Epic® patient records with Verato enables them to understand which new movers aren’t patients yet and should therefore be targeted in the campaign, as well as to measure the campaign’s effectiveness by knowing which new movers ended up being registered in the EHR.
The consolidated data about each patient is also used to feed downstream systems, like their call center. For example, they feed their call center with the best version of demographic data for a patient, from across their various trusted source systems (including Epic®), based on the recency and trustworthiness of the data.
By using Verato to establish a 360-degree view of each patient — and enrich that view with additional socioeconomic and lifestyle attributes — the health system was able to improve its outreach campaigns from Salesforce®, seeing email click rates improve 13x, from 2% to 26%. The health system even saw a 35% improvement in conversion from their care gaps campaign.
Improving patient and clinician experiences by reducing duplicates in Epic®
During the focus group, another Verato customer — a large health system in Georgia — shared how they faced a large volume of duplicates in Epic® on a weekly basis due to claims files from clinical partners being added as new patients. The health system was on the brink of hiring additional staff to manage these duplicate patient volumes.
By implementing Verato, the health system now automates the claims data matching process to prevent duplicates from being created in Epic®. Verato identifies whether each claim matches to an existing patient in Epic® in real time, enabling the health system to prevent a new duplicate record. With Verato, the health system now sees a 75% monthly reduction in claims duplicates, eliminating the need to hire two additional full-time employees.
This automation has significantly improved patient experiences. According to health systems in the focus group, duplicate patient records in Epic® can have drastic impacts on patient, clinician, and administrator experiences:
- Financial impacts for patients: For example, a patient’s insurance may deny tests or imaging because the patient had the same test or image done months ago, but the results are on a duplicate record for that patient that the clinician wasn’t aware of when they ordered the test or image.
- Patient safety and care impacts: Duplicate records can lead to fragmented patient information, where critical health data is scattered across multiple records, making it challenging for healthcare providers to have a comprehensive view of a patient’s medical history. For example, a patient’s follow up imaging might be placed on a duplicate chart, so their radiologist can’t compare the new image to the old to identify if further examination is required.
- Patient experience impacts: For example, the patient cannot register in Epic® MyChart®, or their portal activation doesn’t go through, because the patient has a duplicate record. And when the patient does get access, their clinical history may be incomplete because the rest of their data is on another record.
- Clinician experience impacts: For example, a clinician identifies a duplicate record for a patient when they try to pull up that patient’s chart at the point of care and sees multiple records. The clinician may even have to call their health information management (HIM) or data integrity team to merge a patient’s records together when they identify a duplicate.
- Organizational impacts: Organizations typically employ teams of data integrity analysts, data stewards, and health information managers, to ensure the integrity of patient data and to review and merge duplicate patient records.
- Patient trust impacts: Organizations may need to rebuild patient trust when patients identify that their data is incomplete or if they have a bad clinical or financial experience as a result of their duplicate records.
Automating patient duplicate merges in Epic®
Another Verato customer highlighted how they are using Verato to take duplicate resolution in Epic® to the next level by using Verato to help automatically merge duplicate records in Epic®.
The health system highlighted two specific reasons for the high rate of duplicate records they were seeing: (1) the organization’s growth, and (2) having multiple entry points for patient registration. These entry points include hospitals, clinics, and urgent care service lines, making it complex to manage patient data and identify the same patient across sources. The busy environments in trauma centers and emergency departments particularly contributed to the creation of duplicates.
To manage these challenges, the health system implemented Verato to help automatically resolve a backlog of 140,000 existing duplicates in Epic® that were awaiting manual resolution. In addition to automatically cleaning up the backlog, the health system automatically merges duplicates in Epic® as they are created based on patient matching answers from Verato. To date, the health system has automatically merged more than 70,000 patient duplicates in Epic® that their team marked as having “not enough information” to merge. Verato was able to automatically and confidently merge these using Verato Referential Matching®.
For this Verato customer, automating the resolution of duplicates in Epic® generates $585,000 in annual resource cost savings and generated $990,000 in upfront resource cost savings from resolving the backlog.
More importantly, the health system mentioned how reducing duplicates in Epic® helps:
- Improve patient experiences by reducing duplicate MyChart® accounts.
- Improve clinician experiences by reducing the number of calls clinicians have to make to merge duplicate patient charts. In fact, the focus group participant said that now with Verato in place: “Most of the time, before the hospital or provider can contact us to say ‘Hey, we have this duplicate’, we are merging it or letting them know we were merging before they can admit patients to the floor.”
- Improve administrator experiences by reducing the number of duplicates the HIM and data integrity teams have to review, and by supplying the HIM and data integrity teams with additional information for the remaining duplicate tasks requiring review.
Managing ACO rosters and data loads in Epic®
One focus group participant discussed how the management of accountable care organization (ACO) rosters significantly contributed to the creation of new patient records in Epic®, complicating identity management.
An (ACO) roster is a comprehensive list of patients assigned to a specific ACO. This roster is vital for identifying the patients that healthcare providers are accountable for in terms of quality measures, care coordination, and cost management. Managing an ACO roster is often challenging due to the constant updates and changes in patient information. Factors such as patient mobility, changes in insurance coverage, and modifications in provider affiliations require the roster to be continuously updated to ensure accuracy.
The organization faced the challenge of loading approximately 7,000 ACO patient records per month, half of which resulted in new patient records being created in Epic®. This influx required a robust solution like Verato to streamline the integration of this ACO data and prevent duplicate patient records from being created in Epic®.
Overcoming challenges with digital initiatives and with creating Epic® duplicates during self-scheduling
More than one focus group participant highlighted the surge in digital initiatives and self-scheduling options, particularly since the onset of COVID-19, as a factor in the increase in duplicate patient records in Epic®. Difficulties with self-registration workflows created as many as five or six duplicate records per patient, or even incorrect records, for one organization.
“It multiplies month after month,” a participant said. “If you don’t figure out a process to get it under control, it can very quickly spin out of control.”
Verato® and Epic® are better together
Verato enables organizations to get the most out of their EHR investments by providing them with cleaner, more complete, and more accurate patient and provider data — ensuring better experiences and outcomes for patients, clinicians, and administrators. Verato also enables organizations to gain a single source of truth for identity across their enterprise — so they can know who is who between their EHR and their myriad other applications, data feeds, and joint ventures — ensuring exceptional patient experiences across the care continuum.
Learn more about how Verato can help you get the most out of Epic®.
Epic® is a registered trademark of Epic Systems, Inc. Neither Verato nor its services are sponsored by, endorsed by, or otherwise affiliated with Epic Systems, Inc.
