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At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, 80 percent of tests were missing crucial demographic information.1 Missing data, such as outdated mailing addresses or telephone numbers, makes it unnecessarily difficult for public health organizations to accurately deliver and track test results, perform contact tracing and distribute vaccines.
To address this issue, Verato, a leading provider of next-generation identity resolution technology, has partnered with public health organizations in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington to address the underlying challenges in identity matching across the public health sector.
“The pandemic has highlighted underlying challenges in identity matching for public health organizations and illustrated the need to collect and share the required person-centric data to aid in the fight against the virus,” said Mark LaRow, CEO of Verato. “We would be remiss if we didn’t take it one step further to champion the push for data interoperability and initiatives around population health and health information exchange.”
Verato’s next-generation enterprise master person index (EMPI) solution connects patient data collected by health systems with the person data needed for public health. Its cloud-native, enterprise master person index (EMPI) solution enriches records with demographic information as well as social determinants of health (SDOH). All data, including that within Verato’s reference database, can be accurately associated with the correct patients in a data warehouse or analytics environment, critical for the epidemiology analytics necessary to mitigate the risk of viruses and diseases like COVID-19.
To date, Verato’s EMPI has been deployed by 20 public health organizations and health information exchanges (HIE) across the country, including:
- Healthix, one of the largest public HIEs in the US, serving more than 8,000 healthcare facilities for over 20 million patients in New York City and Long Island
- CORHIO, an independent, nonprofit HIE dedicated to serving all of Colorado’s healthcare stakeholders
- Rio Grande Valley HIE, a nonprofit Community HIE providing interoperability solutions in South Texas
A recent survey facilitated by Verato and eHealth Initiative indicated that 75 percent of public health organizations see a greater need for interoperability between public health and healthcare providers as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. A little over 80 percent of those organizations say they currently experience person identity challenges.
For more information on Verato and its EMPI solution, visit www.verato.com.
1https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/13/upshot/coronavirus-response-fax-machines.html