The Chesapeake Regional Information System for our Patients (CRISP), a not-for-profit regional health information exchange (HIE) serving Maryland and the District of Columbia, has adopted a cloud-based patient matching solution from Verato to assist with automatically processing the most difficult patient matching situations.
The ability to match and link patient identities across its participating organizations is fundamental to CRISP's core services including its clinical query portal and its encounter notification service.
HIEs face a significant challenge with matching and linking patient identities because of the diversity and independence of the institutions they serve. According to a Verato press release, even with large investments in state-of-the-art Master Data Management (MDM) or Master Patient Index (MPI) technologies, HIEs must invest even more in teams of data stewards to manually review the difficult and ambiguous matches that the MDM or MPI tools cannot match automatically.
CRISP will leverage Verato to automatically match many of these difficult and ambiguous matches in real time, saving CRISP the time and effort of manual review, and thus helping its participants provide better care for their patients.
“Our mission is to enable our healthcare community to share data in order to provide better care, reduce costs, and improve health outcomes,” David Horrocks, president of CRISP, said in a statement. “But this ability to share data relies on our ability to identify the same patient across every provider where they have received care. For an HIE like CRISP, this patient matching exercise is especially challenging. During our proof of concept with Verato, their platform was able to match many of our most complex and difficult match decisions, even when faced with missing birthdates and phone numbers. And they can match in real time, so we can inject their answers immediately into our existing workflows.”
CRISP joins San Diego Health Connect (SDHC) and Healthix as the third major HIE using Verato to improve its core patient matching capabilities. With the addition of CRISP, the Verato platform is now being used to help match patient identities for nearly 10 percent of the U.S. population, according to the company.
