The San Diego and Imperial County Health Information Exchange to integrate Verato smart identity technology after successful pilot project boosted patient match rates
MCLEAN, VA (February 9, 2016) – Verato, Inc., a provider of cloud-based patient matching solutions, today announced that San Diego Health Connect (SDHC), a leading Health Information Exchange (HIE), will use the Verato platform to augment patient matching functions critical to its patient record location and exchange services. SDHC currently enables the exchange of electronic medical records between 25 different clinics and hospital systems located throughout San Diego and Imperial County, including nationally ranked UCSD Medical Center, Scripps Health, Sharp Healthcare, Kaiser Permanente, Rady Children’s Hospital, the VA Hospital and the County’s Health and Human Services Agency.
SDHC agreed to implement the Verato solution after a collaborative pilot employing Verato technology successfully increased the number of matched records in SDHC’s MPI by 110%, cutting down the time this outcome would typically take from years to a few short weeks. The SDHC MPI currently manages the identifying information for more than 3.4 million people across the San Diego region and ensures that the records belong to the correct patients. Due to stringent matching criteria, SDHC’s MPI matching algorithm excluded 187,000 patients because of unresolved patient identification. Once these same records were run through Verato, 75% of those mismatches were resolved. Verato then outperformed expectations when it found an additional 126,000 patient matches that the MPI had originally missed.
Under the new agreement, the Verato solution will continue to augment the MPI database through an automated data management feature aimed at detecting matches missed by the standard MPI process.
“SDHC’s mission is to facilitate the exchange of medical records throughout our region so doctors can provide better patient care, decrease the number of duplicate tests and procedures, and decrease costs,” said Dan Chavez, Executive Director, SDHC. “Foundational to exchanging records is the ability to match various records that belong to the same patient, and Verato can increase our match rates without sacrificing SDHC’s stringent data governance standards.”
“Many organizations believe that the matching capabilities in their MPI tools are sufficient for matching patient records,” said Mark LaRow, CEO, Verato. “However, at best, these tools typically result in a 70% match rate given typical error rates in identity data; the other 30% of unmatched identities must be manually resolved, or falsely categorized as non-matches which prevents the information from reaching a patient’s care providers during the care visit. Using our innovative, smart, referential matching engine, Verato will help SDHC match patient records cutting the huge cost and effort associated with manual data quality and stewardship efforts. With high quality data and stringent patient matching standards member providers will have access to a complete picture of a patient’s health information.”
About San Diego Health Connect
San Diego Health Connect (SDHC) is a not-for-profit Health Information Exchange whose purpose is to improve the healthcare of every member of the San Diego community by facilitating the exchange of electronic medical records across 25 different clinics and hospital systems, including nationally ranked UCSD, Scripps, Sharp Healthcare, Kaiser Permanent, Rady Children’s Hospital and the County of San Diego. When every individual’s health information is securely available to their doctors when and where they need it, doctors can provide better care, decrease the number of duplicate tests and procedures, and decrease costs.
About Verato
Verato offers a cloud-based platform that matches and links customer records and identities across systems and enterprises. Verato uses a “referential matching” engine to achieve the highest match rates in the industry, allowing healthcare, commercial, and government organizations to develop a single view of their patients, customers, and citizens. Verato delivers sub-second performance and securely scales to hundreds of millions of transactions to support the largest organizations. Verato maximizes time-to-value and minimizes total cost of ownership because there is no on-premise software to implement. Verato is based in McLean, VA.