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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.