Challenge
Healthix enables healthcare organizations across New York City and Long Island to exchange patient data. One of the organization’s other key responsibilities is data discovery: insights gained through research, analytics, and reporting. As the sheer volume of data continued to grow, the Healthix team realized that they needed an alternative to their legacy Master Person Index, because their data quality wasn’t keeping pace with their analytics goals.
As described by Healthix CEO Todd Rogow: “If you don’t have good patient matching, what’s the point of aggregating data? Without proper identity matching or identity data management, you’re building a house on an unstable foundation.”
Solution
“With Verato, you’re able to keep clinical notifications moving, even if someone entered something wrong in the original data. You’re able to mitigate those errors.”
Nick VanDuyne, CIO, Healthix
Healthix began by using Verato’s plug-in Auto-Steward™ to audit and clean up inconsistencies in existing patient data. Based on their positive experience with Verato, the Healthix team replaced their legacy MPI with Verato Universal™ MPI early in 2019.
“Verato helped us cleanse bad data in a way that really facilitated matching, without changing the source data,” Todd comments. “We were able to overcome shortcomings, such as missing data, inaccurate data, and poor-quality data.”
After a timely implementation supported by Verato, Healthix began to realize the benefits of the next-generation MPI:
- Cloud-based, scalable architecture
- Easy to add new data sources
- Proprietary referential matching
Results
By deploying Verato, Healthix immediately achieved 25 percent better matching between incoming data and its existing information. Verato maintained accurate, consistent person identities across old and new data, helping Healthix to confidently scale up its number of alerts.
“With Verato, you’re able to keep clinical notifications moving, even if someone entered something wrong in the original data. You’re able to mitigate those errors, ” says Healthix CIO Nick VanDuyne.
Recently, Healthix received a $1.1 million grant from the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYec) and established a new system for linking homeless individuals with their medical records, helping healthcare providers and city social services to coordinate care and better understand each person’s clinical and behavioral health needs.
When the pandemic began, Healthix was able to support a wide range of health and safety initiatives on behalf of New York’s city and state departments of health, including family reunification for hospitalized patients and support for a field hospital at the Javits Center (convention center). After the New York region successfully slowed the spread of COVID-19 in the summer of 2020, a number of initiatives continued.
While fulfilling its regular alerting responsibilities, Healthix sends millions of additional medical alerts regarding COVID-19 test results, helping providers and care managers to follow up with patients.
Healthix also provides data to support ongoing contact tracing initiatives across the five boroughs of New York City and Long Island.
“The data that Healthix receives from the region continues to grow exponentially. We needed an application and a partner that could scale at our speed and volume. We have that with Verato.”
Todd Rogow, CEO, Healthix
