The August issue of Health Data Management magazine had an article on “Bridging the Gap” between document imaging systems and EHRs.  It is a good article highlighting the value of document imaging systems and that they aren’t going away, but that they can’t replace an electronic health record (EHR) either.

The challenge with a hybrid EHR/document imaging solution though is that you now have data about the same person in different systems and as the article notes, many document imaging systems do not work in tandem with EHR systems.  This isn’t unique to EHRs and document imaging of course, but is a common problem in healthcare with data about a given patient stored in many different systems from different providers, hospitals, or clinics.

The best way to solve this is with an Enterprise Master Patient Index, or EMPI.  An EMPI connects to or receives updates from the various systems and using probabilistic matching algorithms can automatically match records and create an index that provides a single view of all a patient’s health information.  If you are interested in learning more about an EMPI and specifically the importance of the match engine component, take a look at the Match Engine blog series we are running.  Or if you are looking for an EMPI product, take a look at the MatchMetrix EMPI Suite.