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.

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!

The NextGate team spent today setting up our booth at HIMSS11 at the Orlando Convention Center.  This is our first year exhibiting on our own and it was fun, if not a bit time consuming, to get everything set up, but we are pleased with the result.

If you are at HIMSS, be sure to stop by booth #738 to say hi and learn more about our EMPI and Registry offerings and how they can help your HIE or Meaningful Use initiatives.

If you aren’t at HIMSS, you can still visit our HIMSS page and take a look at much of the information we are sharing with the attendees.

Enjoy the show!

We announced earlier today that MatchMetrix is being used by our partner Covisint to implement the Health Information Exchange at Greater Tulsa Health Access Network.  Greater THAN is one of only 17 Beacon Grant awardees and is the second to be using MatchMetrix as the EMPI joining the Keystone Health Information Exchange in Pennsylvannia.

We are pleased to be part of Greater THAN with Covisint, and if you are attending HIMSS11 next week, our booth (#738) is conveniently located near Covisint’s (#749) so you can stop by and learn more about MatchMetrix and the complete HIE solution Covisint will be implementing.

We look forward to seeing you next week!

We’ve added information on a few of our new partners to our partners page on our web-site.  Take a look to see who is using MatchMetrix as a core part of their health information exchange (HIE) or other healthcare solutions.  The list now includes Axway, Covisint, Misys Open Source Solutions, NextGen Healthcare, PatientKeeper, Portico Systems, and Wise Men.

And as a reminder, we will be at HIMSS so be sure to stop by a say hi, but also stop by our partners’ booths and ask how MatchMetrix is the right solution for them and their customers.

We released a press release yesterday announcing that Geisinger Health System has selected MatchMetrix as their EMPI.  With MatchMetrix, Geisinger will enhance the coordination of patient data across the health system and enable care providers to access patients’ most up-to-date clinical information regardless of location.  It will be used both internally as the EMPI within Geisinger but also as part of the broader Keystone Health Information Exchange.

NextGate has been working with Geisinger for years, assisting with their earlier EMPI and integration implementations, and through that work gained valuable knowledge and experience that has helped us make MatchMetrix to be the most flexible and usable EMPI on the market.

Stay tuned for more information or visit us at HIMSS to learn more about how you can experience a demo version MatchMetrix hands-on.