Verato, Inc., a provider of cloud-based identity matching solutions has announced the availability of the Verato Universal MPI, a revolutionary master patient index (MPI) that represents a different approach to the problem of patient identity resolution.
Unlike conventional MPI technologies that must be laboriously deployed and populated with patient data, the Verato Universal MPI is a pre-built, cloud-based, nationwide master patient index that enterprises can simply “plug into”—without the need for extensive algorithm tuning, data standardization, data governance, data cleansing, or data stewardship processes.
The Verato Universal MPI is pre-populated with pre-mastered and continuously-updated demographic data spanning the entire U.S. population. It incorporates a powerful new matching technology called “referential matching” that leverages this pre-mastered database as an “answer key” to match and link identities that even world-class probabilistic algorithms can never match. Because of its greater accuracy and ease of implementation, it can support the rapidly emerging patient matching needs that conventional MPIs cannot.
Existing MPI technologies are struggling today and will fail with new emerging requirements
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—they suffer unacceptably high duplicate rates and require teams of data stewards to manually resolve duplicate patient identities missed by their algorithms. All of this results in clinicians being unable to find medical records, redundant testing, impaired clinical care, and unclaimable revenue.
The Verato Universal MPI was created to support emerging requirements that conventional MPIs cannot solve. The Verato Universal MPI is designed to:
· Support the rapid addition of new IT systems or applications simply by “plugging them in” using standard APIs—with no additional tuning and no governance or data cleansing required.
· Turbocharge existing MPI technologies by automating their data stewardship, discovering duplicates they miss, and validating identities at registration.
· Support EHR consolidation since each independent EHR that is connected to the Universal MPI can reconcile its patients with the other.
· Support medical record exchange because every institution that is connected to the Universal MPI can resolve its patient identities with each other.
· Enable organizations to achieve the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT’s (ONC) target duplicate rate of 0.5% rather than the current average duplicate rate of 8-12%.
The U.S. needs a consistent nationwide solution for patient identity
A critical weakness in U.S. healthcare today is the inability of healthcare organizations to coordinate patient care. The exchange of clinical information across organizations is currently very difficult, as conventional MPI technologies are unable to unambiguously identify common patients. Issuing a Universal Patient Identifier (UPI) to every person in the country is often proposed as a solution, but such an approach introduces immense logistical and privacy challenges. The Verato Universal MPI offers a much simpler alternative.
Because the Verato Universal MPI operates in a HIPAA and HITRUST certified cloud as a universally-accessible nationwide MPI, it can operate essentially as an identity resolution “utility” for healthcare—not unlike the electric power utility. Just as every enterprise simply plugs into the electric power grid rather than operating an in-house electric generator, every healthcare enterprise can simply plug into the Verato Universal MPI to manage their patient identities rather than operating their own MPI.
Even more remarkably, because every organization that plugs into the Universal MPI indexes its private patient population to the same nationwide reference population, each participating organization has the ability to resolve common patients with other participating organizations. This offers a much simpler and more accurate flow of healthcare information between cooperating organizations.
“Absent a policy change allowing national patient identifiers, I’m thrilled Verato is delivering a new solution for patient matching that provides high accuracy and complete consistency that every enterprise can leverage. Existing MPI technology, operating with different standards and different rules at every institution, can never provide the consistency or accuracy needed. The Verato Universal MPI is built to address the large-scale healthcare needs in the U.S.”
