Nov 18
2022
Modern Health Data Management Requires a Proven Patient Identity Solution
By Gevik Nalbandian, vice president of software engineering, Lyniate.
As healthcare providers manage market shifts such as value-based care, increased consumer expectations, staffing shortages, changing reimbursement models, and competition from non-traditional healthcare players including Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft — what will it take to compete?
Providers must strengthen the internal IT infrastructure systems to better manage patient relationships. This all begins with easy access to accurate patient data. But with the explosion of data in the healthcare ecosystem, this is no small feat.
Interoperability doesn’t end with integration
Reducing friction in health data exchange requires seamless interoperability among different systems. Interoperability is often viewed as accessing and exchanging data, typically through an integration engine for extracting, composing, standardizing, and passing data between disparate systems. This is a necessary component, but it is not sufficient to achieve a full and accurate picture of your patients and patient populations.
A second component is patient identity management. An identity layer, managed through an enterprise master person index (EMPI), is critical to knowing which patients the data is tied to. In an April 2022 report, Gartner describes EMPIs as “crucial tools for reconciling patient identity and addressing medical record matching challenges needed for high-quality healthcare delivery and health information exchange.”
Accurate patient identification ensures every interaction in which data about an individual is captured — regardless of system or location — is linked correctly for a single, up-to-date view of one’s care. This includes diagnosed medical conditions, lab work, imaging, diagnostic tests, medications, allergies, and family medical history. When a patient’s data is trapped in various systems across the continuum, it can have potentially disastrous downstream clinical, operational, and financial effects.
Gaps or errors in the patient identity management process can have serious consequences for patients. According to a recent survey, nearly 40% of U.S. healthcare providers have incurred an adverse event in last two years as the result of a patient matching issue.