The Largest Threat to Patient Safety is Not Medical Errors, it’s the Patient Record
Earlier this week a Wall Street Journal article cited a recent ECRI Institute study which analyzed 7,613 cases of patient identity errors which highlighted the challenges of patient identification across today’s health care organizations. The review discovered that 13% of identification occurred during registration. Despite the widespread adoption of electronic medical record (EMR) systems, new integration techniques, and innovative technical advances to avoid medical errors, problems of record matching continue to be a major challenge for healthcare organizations. This issue is exasperated by the multitude of systems involved in a patient’s continuum of care.
There are plenty of solutions in the market that have had varying levels of success. The standard of accuracy is often measured subjectively driven by the vendors of the various EMR applications. Solutions ranging from Enterprise Master Patient Indexes to advanced mathematical, computational models such as probabilistic and deterministic exist for the IT leadership of any given health care organization to choose. Having worked in healthcare IT for more than 30 years, I can say that I am no data scientist and do not have an advanced degree in statistical mechanics, does your staff?
The fact remains that in this new era of healthcare, IT organizations have to change, and you are being challenged more and more to solve problems that you depended on your vendors of the core systems you purchased to address. Today the CIO and CTO have to be as concerned about mismatched medical records, medical errors and privacy breaches stemming from those records as much as in-house counsel or the Chief Medical Officer. For a moment let’s forget the different studies that claim as high as 13% to 17% of mismatched records in the current dialogue and answer the question. “Can you continue to run your healthcare organization with the increased complexity of electronic systems perpetuating the mismatched data across an organization that will soon have not only EMR data and Claims data but Genomic data to deal with?”
A rhetorical question shamelessly offered so, this author can talk about an alternative approach to addressing this growing issue. The answer? To address the challenge of competently integrating data across sources from systems complex as electronic medical records, population health, claim systems and analytics you need more than just technology, you are going to need a good partner.
“Healthcare IT departments of all sizes are stretched to their limits supporting the numerous complex electronic systems. None of these products work well unless there is a source of truth (SoT) that works for the enterprise, not for a specific vendor. This SoT must make record matches in the 99.99% range across all data sources over time and not duplicate data in yet another data store that IT has to support and maintain. The solution should be light weight and not require a long drawn out implementation including strenuous mapping exercises and significant hardware commitments or new data center instances. This solution must perform on real-time data with sub-second responses across all data source as patients engage the health system. Lastly and most important this solution has to clean, match and maintain all legacy data at a cost that provides economic value.
Introducing GuideIT’s “iVelociti”, the most advanced integration solution with a unified record match that in real-time aggregates a single patient view from diverse sources of information. This is a complete integration technology that provides an interoperability platform including a record by record monitoring, management, and support by real technicians right here in the United States. iVelociti uses the same technology employed by California scientists and researchers to access the world’s largest research-ready Biobank, one of the most comprehensive sources of genetic information. iVelociti has been implemented at one of the largest health systems in the country and has proven this technology can match sources of information ranging from any health plan files, HL-7 and EMR data to a single view in real-time and then remembers that patient’s “Data DNA” for future matching without having to store the records or duplicate data. What is a patient’s Data DNA? Much like a patients Genome data from different sources contains unique patterns that differentiate one individual from another. iVelociti recognizes these discrete patterns and catalogs them including what source the data came from and commits it to memory. This unique approach allows the iVelociti platform to recognize information from existing integration points and new data from systems that have never been connected before and match information in real-time at rates exceeding 99%.”
The solution is a combination of technologies from one of the world’s most comprehensive integration platforms and healthcare. iVelociti is a turnkey service that offers, not only highly efficient data matching, but service based integration, data management, real-time event processing and the support and monitoring to remove the burden from your IT department. If your healthcare enterprise or software development organization is looking for a solution to match different data in real-time, integrate systems across a complex IT environment and have peace of mind that seasoned IT professionals are managing and maintaining the platform for pennies per record, iVelociti is the solution for your organization.
For more information, please contact, Frank Avignone at Frank.Avignone@guideit.com or visit www.guideit.com/i-velociti.
