A critical weakness in U.S. healthcare today is the inability for healthcare organizations to coordinate patient care. The exchange of clinical information across organizations is currently very difficult as conventional Master Patient Index (MPI) technologies are unable to unambiguously identify common patients.
As Aneesh Chopra, former CTO of the U.S and President of NavHealth https://navhealth.com said, “Even as EHRs begin to support patient access to their health information, most providers are still reluctant to deploy the technology without greater confidence in patient and record matching.”
According to Mark LaRow, CEO of Verato® www.verato.com, “The future shows us that we are entering an era where the number and diversity of new healthcare systems will explode with new population health analytics, patient portals, patient engagement applications, telemedicine, and personal health records.”
As reported, healthcare enterprises spend a million dollars or more each year to own and operate their MPIs. Even with the best technology and the best IT staffs, conventional MPI solutions are struggling. As a result, they suffer unacceptably high duplicate rates and require teams of data stewards to manually resolve duplicate patient identities missed by their algorithms.
According to Verato, the company built the MPI from the ground up to solve the patient-matching issue in a completely new way. Today, the Verato MPI has a 98 percent match rate and can reduce patient mismatches by as much as 70 percent.”
Verato created the pre-built, cloud-based, nationwide MPI over four years, investing over 50,000 man hours of data science and engineering efforts, spending millions of dollars to curate over a billion commercially available demographic records sourced from three different industries.
Verato’s MPI contains pre-populated and continuously updated demographic data spanning the U.S population. It incorporates a powerful new matching technology called referential matching that makes it possible for this pre-mastered database to match and link identities that even world-class probabilistic algorithms can never match.
Specifically, Verato’s Universal MPI is designed to support the rapid addition of new IT systems or apps simply by plugging them in, able to support EHR consolidations since each independent EHR connected to the MPI can support medical record exchange, and enables organizations to achieve the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT’s https://www.healthit.gov target duplicate rate of 0.5 percent rather than the current average duplicate rate of 8 to 12 percent.