6 minute read
Meeting consumer expectations in a hybrid health IT landscape
Patients are increasingly expecting a fast, smooth, digitaldriven experience with their healthcare providers that resembles what they can do in other aspects of their lives, says Royston Adamson-Green of NextGate
One-click shopping, locationbased services, and automatic account recognition are the norm in the consumer world, creating frustration among patients who wonder why healthcare seems so far away from catching up.
Despite the best efforts of dedicated information management professionals, health systems are rife with data integrity errors, leading to poor experiences and higher costs. Experts commonly cite duplicate health record rates of around 20 per cent in U.S. health systems, leading to $2000 per patient in unnecessary or repeated medical expenses, totalling $6 billion annually.
A combination of suboptimal technologies, human error, and the fundamentally complex nature of patient information is to blame.
Today’s hybrid IT environment demands that healthcare leaders engage in more comprehensive patient record matching and identification approaches. While electronic health records (EHRs) have become commonplace, the disjointed, competitive nature of systems within a typical healthcare organisation contributes to an influx of duplicate, fragmented and disparate data. Patient matching functionalities within EHRs often lack the complexities to unify information from external systems.
Poorly designed systems that fail to integrate or communicate with one another exacerbate inefficiencies, generating millions of duplicate and incomplete records that lead to patient safety errors, skewed reporting and analytics, administrative burdens, and lost revenue.
While most data entry errors are preventable, lack of an enterprise patient
identification system to automate record matching and clean-up puts patients at risk and prevents physicians from making informed, life-saving decisions.
As data sharing matures and the industry pivots toward collaborative, whole-person care, an enterprise view of high-quality, de-duplicated data is essential for better outcomes and operational efficiencies.
Enterprise master patient indexes (EMPIs), for example, allow organisations to identify and link patient data spread throughout multiple disparate systems and sites of care. EMPIs can also provide extensive data stewardship capabilities to maintain the integrity of patient records.
Tired of EHR systems that only provide a limited view of their patient’s needs, progressive healthcare organisations are leveraging EMPIs as a strategic advantage to integrate social determinants of health (SDOH) data. For many institutions, EMPIs are quickly transforming from a line of defence against duplicate medical records to the default approach for interoperability and population health management.
As a patient matching solution that extends an organisation’s ability to leverage evolving sources of data beyond non-clinical or traditional healthcare settings, an EMPI can help incorporate data from outsourced systems and third sector such as blue light, voluntary groups, and charities to build a complete picture of one’s care. Since the health of individuals is heavily influenced by socioeconomic and behavioural forces, assembling a comprehensive view of one’s health and wellness needs is critical to achieving community-based outcomes.
Royston Adamson-Green Director of Channel Sales NextGate
Rise of consumerisation and the promise of digital identity
As healthcare becomes consumer-driven, it is equally critical to consider use of other identification mechanisms to ensure that patient demographic information is accurate and up-to-date across systems and institutions. Use of personal smartphones, for example, to streamline registration and allow patients to play an active role in managing and updating their data can help to improve patient matching efforts at key stages where data errors often occur— during enrolment and at registration.
The adoption of mobile technology has become part of everyday life. Smartphones have fuelled high expectations for on-the-go, always-connected consumers. Whatever they want, they want it now, so for healthcare organisations aiming to win over customer loyalty and improve the patient experience, harnessing the power of digital identity can be a crucial element of doing business.
In broadest terms, an individual’s digital ID will tend to incorporate some aspect of a person’s legal identity, such as a driver’s licence or passport. These IDs tend to focus on uniquely identifying attributes of an individual such as their legal name, date of birth, gender, and physical address. In healthcare, a digital ID, or credential, can also include one’s private healthcare insurance card or state health system identification number.
Despite the heightened privacy and security concerns, there are enormous opportunities to better integrate digital identities into the healthcare process using a patient’s own mobile device.
Patient registration, for example, is fraught with record look-up and data capture issues. A recent assessment found that one in every 3000 U.S. patient registrations is an exact match to an existing patient with the same first name, last name, and date of birth. Organisations will always have a difficult time knowing that these records should be kept separate, especially without cuttingedge patient identity matching infrastructure in play.
Royston Adamson-Green Director of Channel Sales NextGate
Healthcare can learn from the successes of other industries by creating a digital identification wallet managed by the patient and seamlessly integrated into the provider’s health IT environment.
This strategy will let patients take the lead in double-checking their own data for errors and providing informed consent for data access across providers, all from their own personal devices.
The ideal digital identification solution merges simple, seamless interfaces with advanced privacy and consent features. Patients could download a digital wallet app to create a personalised ID card containing information such as demographics, insurance coverage, and care team members.
A green light could even let providers automatically generate clinical worklists for the encounter ahead, ensuring comprehensive, high-quality care.
To reduce crowding and keep staff and patients safe during the evolving COVID-19 pandemic and emerging threat of the Delta variant, providers could enable remote check-in from the car park, or use location services to begin the check-in process for patients who have just arrived at the clinic. Patients could also use their digital wallet to authenticate requests for information from new or current providers when initiating a new clinical relationship. This would allow users to automatically populate forms and share selected clinical data while remaining fully in control of those accessing their personal information.
Meanwhile, empowering patients to take control of verifying the accuracy of their own demographic data would result in fewer overall errors. With more current, complete, and accurate information, providers can avoid duplicate records and feel more confident in the integrity of their data throughout its lifecycle.
At NextGate, we believe digital identity is the future of enabling fast and convenient care for consumers, while providing secure, efficient, real-time patient identification for health and social care providers. Backed by an EMPI, individuals can be correctly identified, verified, and tied to their health data for a 360-degree patient view. This twopronged approach provides unequivocal matching accuracy while reducing the redundant and paper-based interactions that slow down care delivery.
With these new digital tools in the hands of consumers, healthcare organisations can finally offer the frictionless patient experiences they have been chasing and take one big step closer to conquering 100 per cent patient identification and verification so physicians and other care providers can truly “know their patient.”
Contact Information
royston.adamsongreen@nextgate.com
