Just a quick note to let everyone know that today we released MatchMetrix v7.4 and Access Manager v7.4.  These are minor releases to our EMPI, Provider Registry, Terminology Registry, and other registry products, but include a number of important enhancements our customers will benefit from including:

• Stronger password management features
• Enhancements to the PIX v2/v3 interfaces for improved search results
• New matching rules for more powerful date comparisons
• Upgrade procedure enhancements further streamlining the upgrade process
• Outbound HL7 adapter enhancements for more powerful notifications
• Enhanced Web service APIs

Orion Health, one of NextGate’s MatchMetrix EMPI and Provider Registry partners, announced the launch of LaHIE, Louisiana’s statewide health information exchange.  LaHIE will allow for the secure exchange of health information among authorized providers and across Louisiana’s healthcare system to help improve patient safety, quality of care and health outcomes.

See the full press release here.

An Enterprise Master Patient Index (EMPI) has traditionally been a behind the scenes player in the overall healthcare IT landscape.  It receives ADT or other registration/admission/update messages from heterogeneous systems across the enterprise, looks for existing matching records, and where matches occur, indexes the records and merges them together to create the single best record (SBR).  Many EMPIs also support notifying the participating systems when changes occur to records so that they can automatically update their local records.

This works fine, but has the EMPI playing a passive role where duplicates and errors are corrected after the fact.  This type of integration is aptly called “passive integration”.  Wouldn’t it be better if the creation of duplicate records could be avoided during the registration or admitting process?  Wouldn’t registration go more smoothly if patient searches could do fuzzy searching rather than having to be exact?  And wouldn’t it save time if the demographic data from the existing SBR or “golden record” in the EMPI could be used rather than requiring error prone data entry?

This is where “active integration” comes in to play.  With active integration, the scheduling, registration, admitting, or other application makes use of standard protocols like HL7 and PIX/PDQ to interact with the EMPI during the registration process to perform the patient search and retrieval of their demographic information instead of querying the local database.  This accomplishes a number of things:

• If the patient is already in the EMPI from visiting a member hospital, clinic, or doctor’s office, but is now visiting a new office, their information is found in the EMPI and can be used for registration avoiding error prone data entry.
• If the patient has visited this office before but has updated information in the EMPI from other visits to other facilities, that updated information is immediately available and does not need to be re-entered.
• The EMPI has fuzzy matching algorithms that can be used during the search so that typos, mis-spellings, or incomplete search criteria can still result in finding the right patient record quickly.
• By finding the right existing patient record, duplicate entry is avoided which reduces the time spent dealing with managing those later and aids in ensuring timely and accurate billing can take place.

We at NextGate have implemented active integration using our MatchMetrix EMPI for many customers across a spectrum of HIS systems, and are increasingly seeing more healthcare organizations asking about it.  If you’d like to learn more about how active integration can help your organization streamline and improve registration and billing, contact us!

At NextGate we spend a fair amount of time talking with customers and prospects about their challenges with managing patient records and as you would expect, we hear some different use cases from time to time.  Not every EMPI implementation is the standard initial load from 3 systems matching records to remove duplicates, and then receive updates and match records as patients are registered or their records get updated.

I had the opportunity to visit a medical center this week where they had slightly different challenge.  They are a long time Meditech user and it is used throughout the hospital for registration and billing and is core to their operations.  There are some clinics and other facilities that use other systems but the volume is low enough that they simply perform a duplicate registration in Meditech at the end of each day.

The challenge is that they will be implementing Epic at one of their larger facilities, and cannot afford to perform the manual duplicate registration with the volumes present at this facility.  However, given the investment in and dependence on Meditech for running the business, they still must get these patients and their registrations into Meditech.  The process they are looking for is to be able to perform the registration in Epic but have it search against the total user population and use existing information to streamline the registration, but also retrieve the unique patient ID used by Meditech so that the two systems are “linked” from the beginning.  If it is a new patient, the registration should cause a new patient registration in Meditech automatically as well.

We were able to outline to them how with an Enterprise Master Patient Index (EMPI) they could maintain the single view of the patient they want, but furthermore implement an active integration with Epic so that the EMPI is searched at registration to get the benefits of searching the entire population, the results from a probabilistic search are returned improving productivity, and the linkage to the Meditech identifier can be made immediately.  This solution will save them time and money and allow them to continue to reuse their existing investment in Meditech, but also lay the foundation to implement similar solutions with other EMR or patient management systems and allow them to reap the benefits of having that patient centric view in the EMPI.

If you have unique challenges with integrating the systems you have for managing patient records, let us know and we’ll show you how we can help.

We are a little belated in noting this, the GE press release is from last month, but Harrison Medical Center in Western Washington is using the  NextGate MatchMetrix EMPI as part of their GE eHealth Information Exchange.  As noted in yesterday’s blog entry on the announcement with Orion Health, there is growing momentum with partners selecting MatchMetrix and implementing it to solve customers patient centric view challenges.

Whether it is a Health Information Exchange (HIE), Accountable Care Organization (ACO), or just a collection of cooperating healthcare facilities, being able to accurate identify patients is critical to efficient and correct exchange of patient information enabling improved patient care and lowering healthcare delivery and administration costs.

But it doesn’t stop at just patients, our portfolio of Registries includes a Provider Registry and many of our partners have selected it as well.  Having accurate information on providers, their credentials, the services they offer at which locations, is another great way to offer better services and drive greater efficiency into operations.  Also, we offer a Relation Registry that is used to create and maintain the relationships between patients (spouse, dependent, guarantor, etc.), between providers, and between patients and providers (PCP, Admitting Physician, Attending Physcian, etc.) achieving even greater value from the information in the EMPI and other registries.

Contact us for more information on how we can deliver value for your healthcare organization, ACO, or HIE.

We have added yet another partner to our fold with Orion Health selecting the MatchMetrix EMPI and Provider Registry to be used in their Health Information Exchange (HIE) offering.  Read the full release here.

Orion becomes the latest of a growing number of partners that includes NextGen, Covisint, GE Healthcare, Axway, PatientKeeper, Portico, and MOSS.  Some of these are new EMPI selections but a number have replaced an existing third party EMPI and were done because of the completeness, accuracy, and extensibility MatchMetrix provides along with the years of experience the NextGate staff bring to developing and implementing EMPIs.

Thank you Orion, we look forward to many successes with our customers.

NextGate is pleased to announce the availability of MatchMetrix 7.2.  While it is a minor release there are a number of new features our customers and partners will put to use right away.  Here is a sampling of a few of them.

Like they say, a picture tells a thousand words, and to that end we’ve added a new dashboarding feature to give a visual summary of the state of the EMPI or registry.  The dashboards are fully configurable to include whatever statistics or metrics you desire, but here is an example of what can be shown.

Continuing on the theme of new visual features, we’ve added the ability to include images in the EMPI or registry that can be a great aid to a data steward trying to compare records to determine if they are for the same person.  Seeing a picture of the same person can be the clear indicator they need to quickly make the determination reducing the time spent maintaining the EMPI.  Here are a couple examples, one of a photo and another of a scanned insurance card.

Another visual feature is the ability to generate and store QR codes.  If you attended HIMSS, you probably saw a number of healthcare solutions making use of QR codes or other types of barcodes, and with this release MatchMetrix can be a key component and enable such solutions.  Here is a QR code automatically generated for a person in the EMPI.

A feature that isn’t quite as visual, but nonetheless very valuable and requested by a number of our customers is the ability to see the details of what makes up the match weight score.  Simply mousing over the weight in the search results shows those details.

Many organizations are just installing an EMPI, but others are taking the next step to implement other types of registries for other entities like providers.  With this release the MatchMetrix Provider Registry can be integrated with the Location Registry.   The Location Registry maintains a record of physical locations and their logical use, defines physical locations down to a floor or room level within a building, and supports the development of Service Delivery Location Registries. When integrated with the Provider Registry, it helps create location aware services and queries.

Last, going even a step further, the EMPI and Provider Registry can be integrated with and via the Relation Registry.  This allows easy mapping and listing of the relationships within and between registries or the creation of records to include relations that aren’t in a registry.  This is becoming increasingly important in the implementation of Health Information Exchanges.

If you visited our booth at HIMSS, you saw a preview of many of these features.  If you didn’t, you can still take a look by registering for our online hosted EMPI demo.  With this demo you’ll have full access to a MatchMetrix EMPI installation and can use Data Quality Manager to experience most of the features above.  Please register, or just drop us an e-mail at info@nextgate.com if you have any questions.

We held the first webinar in our fall webinar series last week providing a deep dive into Monk2J including a demonstration. We’ve had requests for the presentation and it is now available here.

The webinar series continues next week on 11/4 at 10am PT with a discussion of the benefits of integrated registries in a Health Information Exchange. Register now to reserve your seat for what will be a great event.

We’ve added another webinar, this one with our partner Wise Men on 11/17 at 1pm PT, on simplifying the migration of Monk integration components and other SeeBeyond, ICAN, and Java CAPS related migration issues. Join us to learn how NextGate and Wise Men can help you.

As a thank you to those that attend our webinars, we will be randomly selecting one attendee from all of our remaining webinars this year to win an iPod.  The more webinars you attend, the better your chances of winning, so attend as many as you can.

The full list of webinars the rest of the year is listed on our webinars page and you’ll also see links to download presentations from prior webinars there too.

Last, we want to continue to share our insights and solutions with you as we begin 2011 and are presently planning our webinar schedule for the first quarter.  If there are topics or subjects you’d like to see us address, please contact us at webinars@nextgate.com.

We look forward to hearing from you and meeting you on a future webinar.

We are pleased to announce that MatchMetrix 7.1 is now available.  While this isn’t a major release with lots of new functionality, it is nevertheless important as it addresses some key customer requests and delivers some incremental enhancements that improve usability and efficiency.

With this release both Provider Index and Terminology Index are fully Access Manager enabled.  The authentication and access control can be be fully applied to both of those products.

We have also continued the theme of moving more of the index configuration to the database.  This further streamlines configuration and reconfiguration making management, administration, and tuning of a deployed system far easier.

If you are a customer, contact us to get the release.  If you aren’t a customer but want to learn more, visit nextgate.com/product or e-mail us at info@nextgate.com.

We’ve been busy making updates to our collateral and web-site for some of the recently released products so here is a guide for where to find what is new.

With the release of MatchMetrix 7, we now have new datasheets for the MatchMetrix MDM Platform and MatchMetrix EMPI Suite.  Both are available on our Resources page as well as the respective product pages.  Besides having new content for the release, we hope you like the new look we’ve given our datasheets.

On the web-site, we gave it a minor facelift with some new imagery (look closely and you might see similarity to the datasheets!), but more importantly we now have updated product pages for all the MatchMetrix platforms and suites.

Take a look and let us know what you think.