Why Accurate Patient Identity is Critical to Health System Success

Just for Fun/News and Events

Your team has been forced to pivot. Virtual care and digital patient experience are taking on even higher priority with strong visibility. A reliable, 360-degree understanding of each patient is critical to these initiatives—but getting to this view is complicated. Patient data exists in many locations across your enterprise and beyond.

An enterprise master person index (EMPI) helps achieve a patient360 view. While EMPIs have long been used by health information management (HIM) teams to link records from multiple systems in order to reduce duplicate records, EMPIs now must fill a broader role.

In their report, “Identity Biometrics and Next-Generation EMPIs Combine to Address Duplicate Medical Records and HIE Challenges,” Gartner writes about next-generation EMPI solutions, saying “Conventional EMPI systems use deterministic and probabilistic algorithms to locate, match and merge patient records across multiple information systems. However, this approach has not been entirely effective in reconciling identities and often results in duplicate patient records, erroneous patient record overlays, and onerous HIM reconciliation and cleanup activity.”

“With more digital capabilities dependent upon high data quality, and generating more failure points for duplicates, CIOs find they need a different strategy to address patient records management internally and across an ecosystem of partners.”

Barry Runyon, VP Analyst at Gartner

A next-generation EMPI readily supports these emerging digital initiatives.

No longer a commodity: Why every CIO needs a next-generation EMPI

Traditionally, the goal in resolving duplicate medical records was to improve patient safety. While that goal is still vital, it’s clear that duplicate medical records are a symptom of a larger patient identification and health information exchange challenge. How quickly can you act on patient and consumer information that is moving across your enterprise, spanning every point of service?

Helping address this larger identity challenge is exactly where a next generation EMPI fits. No longer a commodity, identity data management and EMPIs have been reinvigorated.

Identity is the backbone of data-driven initiatives

A next-generation identity data strategy delivers innovation that helps you hit the mark for a more competitive, connected patient experience.

Let’s take a closer look at the benefits offered by this new era of EMPI and how it helps support emerging data-driven initiatives. Like a conventional master person index, a core competency of next-generation EMPI is linking or connecting person records from a variety of sources, identifying patient data integrity errors like duplicates or overlays, and allowing stewards to manage data.

The difference comes down to “how” and “how fast.” A next-generation EMPI removes barriers to matching data, without requiring you to spend days, weeks, or months on hard-to-govern data standardization, data clean-up, and data integration.

As Gartner explained in the report cited above, a next generation EMPI offers many benefits. These include:

  1. Cloud-native for low Total Cost of Ownership. Cloud-native, multi-tenant SaaS rapidly scales, offers built-in redundancy, and automates backups/maintenance with nearly zero manual work required. This is included in the cost of a predictable subscription model.
  2. Time to value. Deploys and delivers value in as little as five weeks because it is cloud native.
  3. Integration options. Relies on proven integration methods including APIs. These APIs are ideally suited for a microservice architecture that supports new consumer apps and CRM as well as traditional EHR integrations (e.g. HL7).
  4. Data stewardship. Arms your teams with a clean, easy-to-use, intuitive data governance application that brings transparency to external data and closes gaps in your data, while making data stewards more effective and more satisfied.
  5. Secure. Out-of-the box HITRUST certification and HIPAA, SOC II, and PCI compliance.
  6. Referential matching. Tightly integrates reference data sources that are curated specifically for healthcare across many sources of data. This additional information allows for more informed decision-making and matching of person records; in most cases a little more than half of a stewardship duplicate queue can be automatically resolved through referential matching. Referential matching is an included feature, not something you pay extra for, and it never demands that you contribute your data back to the solution.
  • Cloud-native for low Total Cost of Ownership. Cloud-native, multi-tenant SaaS rapidly scales, offers built-in redundancy, and automates backups/maintenance with nearly zero manual work required. This is included in the cost of a predictable subscription model.
  • Time to value. Deploys and delivers value in as little as five weeks because it is cloud native.
  • Integration options. Relies on proven integration methods including APIs. These APIs are ideally suited for a microservice architecture that supports new consumer apps and CRM as well as traditional EHR integrations (e.g. HL7).
  • Data stewardship. Arms your teams with a clean, easy-to-use, intuitive data governance application that brings transparency to external data and closes gaps in your data, while making data stewards more effective and more satisfied.
  • Secure. Out-of-the box HITRUST certification and HIPAA, SOC II, and PCI compliance.
  • Referential matching. Tightly integrates reference data sources that are curated specifically for healthcare across many sources of data. This additional information allows for more informed decision-making and matching of person records; in most cases a little more than half of a stewardship duplicate queue can be automatically resolved through referential matching. Referential matching is an included feature, not something you pay extra for, and it never demands that you contribute your data back to the solution.

Download this guide to learn more about how a next-generation EMPI can save you time and money while helping you successfully tackle digital initiatives.