At NextGate, we develop software for the express purpose of enabling healthcare organizations to provide better and more timely patient care.  We are proud of this, particularly when our families and friends require care.  But for 2012, we set a goal to do even more to help, and so we become a sponsor of an organization that has personal importance to us: the Breast Cancer Society.

Starting this year, we asked our customers to fill out a survey, each completed response resulting in a donation to the Breast Cancer Society.  And at HIMSS12 in February, we will be making a donation for each visitor to our booth.  Throughout the rest of the year we will be looking for other opportunities to make donations and encourage others to join us if you are so inclined.

On a personal note, as the son and son-in-law of breast cancer survivors, supporting this organization has a special meaning to me and I’m glad to be working for a company that is committed to philanthropic work like this.

For several years, NextGate has been participating at the IHE Connectathons to validate interoperability with other vendors products across several different standards related to EMPIs such as PIX/PDQ, and XCPD and ATNA logging.  This year is no different and we will be in Chicago for the IHE North American Connectathon 2012 next week.

Another year of IT dreams, frustrations, initiatives, and realities comes to a close. The pace of technological innovation is accelerating; data is produced, analyzed, and consumed in abundance everywhere in our daily lives, everywhere. And the cloud now keeps everything connected and synchronized. As a result, we’ve become accustomed to a certain level of convenience and availability…and a degree of laziness. What, no signal? No Wi-Fi?

Given the exciting potential of this environment, one (of many) consequence keeps challenging us: data organization. As our customers relate, “we have so much data, it’s hard to control. There are so many duplicate records that it’s easier to create a new record than find the existing one.” And when this data is exchanged with other applications or organizations, like in an HIE or ACO, the problem multiplies and keeps making itself worse! What’s needed is an organizing agent, a solution that is both intelligent and easy.

I have spent the greater part of my life working on this problem, especially as it relates to health care. Viewing wrong or incomplete patient information can have dire effects, and the secondary misfortune is that it doesn’t have to happen this way. In many instances, the situation could have been avoided in the first place because the right patient information is available, just not findable. Organizing data into a patient-centric view is absolutely possible, and I’ve dedicated my company to providing solutions that mitigate this unnecessary problem.

For NextGate, 2011 was full of exciting developments. Revenue grew for the 7th consecutive year, we added staff in nearly every department, our newest business partner, Orion Health, embedded our MatchMetrix technology into their HIE solution, and we added a number of new customers including Geisinger Health System, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Harrison Medical Center, MyHealth Access Network, Keystone HIE, and one of the largest hospitals in New York City. We are pleased to be serving more customers than ever before, and our registries are now managing in excess of 60 million person and provider identities.

On the product front, we are happy to announce that MatchMetrix EMPI is now KLAS Rated. Additionally, we launched MatchMetrix Multi-Language to provide the language and locale specific capabilities required for accurate record matching in European and Asian countries. We’ve already started several international implementations and look forward to this being a huge growth area in 2012. We have also branched into other markets with our MatchMetrix MDM Platform so they can take advantage of our leading matching technology and registry solutions.

We saw many of you at HIMSS in Orlando, and we look forward to seeing you again at HIMSS12 in Las Vegas, booth #7000. We have very exciting new solutions to introduce. As part of our effort to stay at the leading edge of standards compliance, we continued to participate in and be certified by the IHE Connectathons. We’ll be at the next one in Chicago in January 2012 (brrr!)

In closing, we’d like to say thanks to our customers and partners for giving us the opportunity to work hand-in-hand solving your biggest challenges and delivering solutions that are cost effective, drive business value, and help save patient lives. See you in 2012.

Andy and the entire NextGate team

NextGate will be exhibiting at HIMSS12, February 20-24 in Las Vegas, Nevada. It has been a busy year with new customers, new partners, new products, and a lot of great experiences implementing solutions for our customers, and we look forward to sharing this with the thousands of attendees in person.

A few key things you should plan to see:

• Demonstrations of the latest version of our KLAS rated MatchMetrix EMPI and MatchMetrix Provider Registry, two critical components to successful HIE implementations
• MatchMetrix Multi-Language with purpose built matching technology for non-English locales and countries
• How circle of care initiatives can be implemented with our MatchMetrix Actvity Registry providing a comprehensive view of all encounters a patient has with your facilities and staff
• Case studies and profiles of NextGate customers including sites where we replaced competitors EMPI, brand new customers in Europe, and those using our Terminology Registry

If you will be attending HIMSS12, look for us in Booth #7000 right inside the entrance to the Venetian Ballroom.

NextGate is actively looking for candidates for Development, Sales, and Professional Services positions.  If you are interested in working for an exciting and growing company with an opportunity to make a real difference, take a look at the Careers page on our web-site to learn more.

The current open positions include:

• Sales Account Executive
• Business Development Manager
• Senior GUI Developer
• Junior Java Developer – Professional Services
• Junior Flex GUI Developer

We look forward to hearing from you!

NextGate has partnered with numerous healthcare solution vendors to embed our EMPI and other registries in their offerings, and they continue to win new Health Information Exchange business.

• LHCQF selects Orion Health as primary technology provider for LaHIE
• Covisint Selected by HealthShare Montana to Provide Statewide Health Information Exchange
• Inland Empire Health Information Exchange Near Launch

Congratulations to each partner and we look forward to supporting you in the implementations.

I came across a list of the 10 Benefits of Health IT and reading through the list noticed that many of the benefits are due to an EMPI being part of the IT infrastructure.  Let’s take a look at 5 of the 10.

1. Enables more informed decision-making and enhanced quality of care – Many factors go into enabling this including EMR systems and new mobile or bed-side technologies, but the key here is informed decision making.  To be informed, a healthcare provider must have a complete view of the patient and an EMPI is integral to this.
2. Creates more efficient, convenient and potentially more cost-effective delivery of care – Similar to being informed, efficiency depends on having accurate information as does the bottom line.  An EMPI enables this efficiency and improved revenue cycle management which can lower the costs of providing care.
3. Facilitates earlier – and more accurate – diagnoses – The single view of a patient an EMPI provides can help avoid the time and cost of repeated or duplicate tests, or provide a historical view that allows more rapid and accurate decisions to be made.
4. Provides greater, and faster, access to a patient’s medical history, reducing the risk of negative drug interactions or poor response to a course of treatment – Having rapid access to medical history is in part achieved through an EMR, but rarely is everything in a patient’s history located in one place.  Being able to easily cross-reference identifiers between systems is critical to having a complete view of a patient’s medical history.
5. Improves administrative efficiency and coordination – Coordinating care between providers can be very complex.  Having a unique identifier for patient and the ability to cross-reference between other identifiers drives down administrative time and effort as health information is exchanged.

Now, an EMPI by itself does not result in all of these benefits being realized, other technologies and systems are certainly involved.  And the other 5 benefits in the article certainly involve other leading edge technologies like mobile, video, and wireless.  But without an EMPI the 5 above are not easily achieved, or certainly not cost effectively.

If you are a healthcare organization and are looking to achieve the above benefits, comply with Meaningful Use, or participate in an ACO or HIE, contact us and we’ll share more with you on how an EMPI or other Registry can cost-effectively get you there.

NextGate is pleased to announce the availability of MatchMetrix 7.3.  This is a minor release and as such rolls up a variety of fixes we’ve made since 7.2 was released, but also includes a number of enhancements.  Here is a sampling.

We are seeing increased interest in the MatchMetrix Relation Registry and in response to that demand we’ve enhanced the Web services APIs to provide a richer set of services for search for and creating relationships, whether patient/provider, parent/child, patient/guarantor, provider/organization or any other relationship that may need to be managed.

A number of enhancements have been made to the MatchMetrix PIX/PDQ Manager including the addition of a pre-processor, support for additional fields, and various header validations.

We are always enhancing our GUIs to provide better usability and the Data Quality Manager data stewardship interface has been updated to provide enhanced status and connection information.

Generating reports from an EMPI or registry is always important and the MatchMetrix Reporter now has additional configuration options.

Last, we know that upgrading an EMPI requires some time to install, configure, and test the new version and to aid in this process MatchMetrix now supports deploying two versions of the application to the same application server.  This means a second application server instance need not be setup while both versions are running while the upgrade is in process.

Drop us an e-mail at info@nextgate.com if you have any questions.

U.S. News recently released a report on the best hospitals based on data from nearly 5,000 hospitals.  They slice the data a bunch of ways by specialties and geographies, but their honor roll of the 17 that met their strict criteria to be the cream of the crop.

There are a bunch of big names as you would expect on the honor roll list, Johns Hopkins, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, UCLA, and a bunch of others, and what is pleasingly interesting is that of the 17 listed, NextGate is working with 6 of them.  And we are working on adding the the count so stay tuned.

KLAS Research is a healthcare IT analyst organization that serves the healthcare provider community through research and analysis of IT vendors and their products.  They are well respected and many organizations utilize their analysis in IT research, planning, and execution.

With that as background, NextGate is pleased to announce that MatchMetrix EMPI is now one of a select few EMPI products that is rated by KLAS.  Our listing on KLAS can be found here, and healthcare organizations and providers are given free access to the KLAS performance database where our detailed rating is available.

We at NextGate are proud of MatchMetrix and appreciate our customers willingness to speak with KLAS.  If you are a provider looking for an EMPI, please take a look at the KLAS ratings for the category and if you’d like to learn more, contact us!