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:
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.
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:
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!
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 new year got off to a quick start for NextGate as we participated in the IHE Connectathon 2011 in Chicago in mid-January. As anyone that has participated can attest, it can be a hectic and trying time as you scramble to send and receive messages and otherwise interoperate with hundreds of of systems and vendors. But it can also be rewarding when you validate that the standards support you’ve implemented does indeed work and your customers will benefit from it.
This year our testing focused on the Patient Identifier Cross Reference (PIX) and Patient Demographic Query (PDQ) series of tests and MatchMetrix EMPI successfully passed 55 tests against 20 different vendors across the IHE uses cases, including those employing HL7 version 3.
If you are attending HIMSS11 in Orlando in a few weeks, stop by the IHE Interoperability Showcase in Hall E, Orange section, Station 22, where MatchMetrix will be running. Or stop by booth #738 in Hall A&B and visit our main booth.
Back in February at HIMSS, NextGate and Hartford Hospital announced a collaboration to use MatchMetrix in Hartford’s Health Information Exchange (HIE) implementation. The implementation allows Hartford to improve patient care by uniquely identifying a patient across different visits to different locations in the Hartford healthcare system and beyond.
To share more about the challenge Hartford had and the solution NextGate was able to bring with MatchMetrix, we’ve written a case study that is now available on our Resources page. Give it a read to learn how MatchMetrix is a cost effective solution for uniquely identifying a patient so that all their data from multiple sites can be accurately associated with them.
To learn more about NextGate can help solve your enterprise master index/EMPI or HIE needs, contact us at info@nextgate.com.
Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) organizes Connectathons on a regular basis for vendors of healthcare IT to come together to test their products to ensure they are interoperable according to the defined integration profiles. Back in April, NextGate successfully used MatchMetrix to demonstrate Patient Identifier Cross Reference (PIX) and Patient Demographic Query (PDQ) standard interoperability across all IHE use cases.
This means that healthcare organizations using MatchMetrix can be confident that they can invoke PIX/PDQ as a means to cross-reference patient identifiers between hospitals, care sites, Health Information Exchanges (HIE), and more, as well as query a central patient information server and retrieve a patient’s demographic and visit information.
Once interoperability is demonstrated, an IHE Integration Statement may be published which is available on our IHE Compliance page or directly here. Additionally, the IHE has created the IHE Product Registry as a way for users to search for products supporting IHE Profiles with published IHE Integration Statements.
We are pleased to announce that MatchMetrix is now in the IHE Product Registry. There are several ways you can find us there, the easiest being to search on company NextGate, but you can also search on the ATNA, CT, PIX, or PDQ profiles within the IT-infrastructure domain and we show up there too. Go take a look!
