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!

The creation of Accountable Care Organizations (ACO) is becoming a priority in healthcare as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) finalizes the rules for participating in the Medicare Shared Savings program.  The focus on coordinated care is aimed at encouraging providers to create a patient-centered circle of care so that all providers, whether they are hospitals, specialty groups, or individuals, can share patient health information efficiently and provide better care at a lower cost than before. To achieve shared savings and receive the full reward payments possible, the ACOs will be required to meet 65 specific performance thresholds.

Soon after acceptance by CMS, ACOs will be assigned specific Medicare patients.  At this point, caregivers are anticipated to have a spectrum of tools at their disposal to be able to handle care coordination of their patient population.   The success of the Accountable Care delivery system  depends on the quality and efficiency of communication within that circle of care built around each individual patient.  To achieve that improvement in care and cost-savings, the participating providers need to have access to a consolidated single view of the patient and their health information.

Core to this single view is an Enterprise Master Patient Index (EMPI), but equally important given the landscape of providers providing the care is a Provider Registry and Directory.

An EMPI automatically matches and indexes patient information from the heterogeneous registration, admitting, and other patient management systems.  Some organizations may seek the nirvana of a single patient management system, but few if any are able to achieve this, and an ACO in particular, with the variety of participating providers, is highly unlikely to be in such a position.  Without an EMPI, it is impossible to obtain that single view and bear the fruit that results from it.

Taking the next step in establishing the circle of care, a Provider Registry is the comprehensive and trusted master registry of all information about providers and the services they are authorized to deliver.  The registry maintains core demographic information, including license and credential status, relationships between entities and roles, and multiple work locations.  Further, a Provider Registry coupled with an EMPI enables the creation and management of all of the relationships between a patient and their providers.  With the ability to link provider records together and create relationships to patients, the circle of care will begin to take shape around that patient.  It is impossible to envision an ACO without these tools.

With an EMPI and Provider Registry, Care Coordinators will be able to search and link up to other specialists and caregivers depending on their assignees needs, and manage the relationships between a patient and their caregivers.  Access to these resources will lead to fewer medical mistakes, improved coordination, elimination of duplicate or unnecessary tests, and a better overall care experience for the patient.  The reductions in expenses and increase in quality care due to this streamlining will translate into powerful actionable intelligence that an ACO will then report to CMS to meet the 65 quality measures.

When coupled with a portal, patients are able to easily view and comment on these relationships.  This level of patient-empowerment and inclusion supports the pressure being put on the healthcare community to educate and bring the patient into the decision-making process so they can actively participate in their own health care delivery.  This also provides a solution to some of the requirements CMS has put on patient-involvement to improve the quality of the care experience.

ACOs that are connected at this level will be in the most advantageous position when they are assigned their Medicare patients.  The CMS and the participating Federal Agencies will view them in a preferable light when the application window opens in January 2012.  As potential ACOs gear up for the application process, participating members, whether they are hospitals, specialty groups, or individual health professionals providers, will need to cross-reference their databases and flush out duplicates and other disparities to gain a clear picture of their patient population as well as their practicing doctors and staff.

While potential ACOs today are moving forward with their strategies, the need for an EMPI is being accepted by all as the most important steps to creating a crucial panoramic view of their patients’ medical status and history.  There is no alternative solution that does a better job and is more capable at supporting the monumental task of linking millions of records across multiple sources than NextGate’s MatchMetrix EMPI.  An EMPI will be the cornerstone of every ACO’s success given the guidelines proposed by CMS.  The sooner this is understood and the sooner preemptive action is taken to invest in an EMPI, the better positioned an ACO will be in 2012.

To learn more about NextGate’s offerings, check out our EMPI and Provider Registry sections of our web-site.

NextGate’s roots are in providing technical services to our customers as that was our core business when the company was founded 7 years ago.  We’ve since added our MatchMetrix line of EMPI and registry products but still continue to provide outstanding service to customers with their EAI and EMPI implementations, whether they are using our MatchMetrix products or the Sun/SeeBeyond products we have years of experience with.

Thus it is very satisfying when we get a testimonial from a customer that speaks highly of the services we provide and our staff providing the services.  We recently received such a testimonial from The Hospital of Central Connecticut and it is on our testimonials page but also below.

During a recent overnight upgrade to our integration infrastructure, our team ran into an issue. The issue did not fall under NextGate’s support, however, despite that and the late hour, NextGate went above and beyond to help us resolve the issue and provide a quick workaround. This is the type of partnership that we truly appreciate and plan to continue in the future. Thank you again for providing us great service, because without it, the upgrade would not have been as successful as it was.

Hyatt Hollman
Service Delivery Manager
The Hospital of Central Connecticut

Thanks go out to all our customers for giving us the opportunity to serve them.

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.

After three fantastic days of meetings, demos, seeing old friends, and meeting new partners and customers, HIMSS11 has come to an end. We had participated at prior HIMSS with partners, but this was our first booth of our own and it was a great experience.

We literally had 100s of visitors come by the booth from folks that knew nothing about us or even EMPIs to organizations looking to implement an HIE to customers that have implemented MatchMetrix and are in production managing millions of unique patient records to provide a single patient view enabling better and more cost efficient care.

Our booth giveaway was a red stress cube, a refreshing change from the traditional stress ball, and they were a hit as we ran out the afternoon of the last day. Everyone that stopped by was also entered to win a Visa Gift Card, those that got a demo gaining an extra entry.  The winner of the gift card will be selected shortly and subscribe to our newsletter to  learn who wins.

Gevik, Kevin, Dan, and Andy were busy giving demos of our matching technology and rich user interface for data stewards to manage the EMPI and Provider Registries.  This included showing all the new features we’ve developed over the past few months including dashboards to quickly see the health and status of the EMPI or registry, the ability to include pictures, images of IDs, and automatically generated QR codes, and our Relationship Registry which ties together the EMPI, Provider, and Location Registries to give a complete view of the circle of care.

We were also present in the IHE Interoperability Showcase where we were connected and interoperating through PIX/PDQ with many of the same vendors we were during the IHE Connectathon held last month in Chicago.

With the completion of the event, our work was not done and we had to tear down the booth and pack it up to be sent back home. This was a new booth for us and it worked great and you can expect to see us use it again at HIMSS12 or other events.

Thanks to all that attended and stopped by.  If you didn’t attend or weren’t able to stop by, please visit our HIMSS page where all the resources we had at the booth are available for download, and if you’d like to use MatchMetrix yourself, register for our online EMPI demo!

See you next year at HIMSS12!