Identity management is one of the most challenging problems healthcare IT organizations face. For those not familiar with identity management, you may wonder why it’s such a big problem. I saw it first hand when I first started working in healthcare at a student health center at a university. We automatically uploaded the patients each evening from a list provided by the registrar. About 27,000 students uploaded each day and very basic data matching. A simple process until you started to realize how many duplicate patient records end up being created. Plus, what shocked me more was how even within that small population there were two people with the same name and same birthdate. Hard to believe, but it was true. You couldn’t just merge their records or we would have merged two different people which would have had all sort of HIPAA and safety issues.
The good news is that patient identity has come a long way since those days. Next generation EMPI (Enterprise Master Patient Index) solutions have become very sophisticated at ensuring a person’s identity matches. This is important because John Does still show up at your hospital which creates a duplicate record and health data interoperability built into most solutions literally requires good identity management.
One problem I’ve seen with health IT applications is that they haven’t addressed good EMPI within their solution. Sure, their tech team coddles together some solution, but in most cases they really don’t understand the key nuances required to do high quality EMPI. They limp along with their homegrown system until troubles start to pop up. And pop up it does.
Healthcare IT Today recently collaborated with Rhapsody to create a new eBook called From Data Chaos to Clean Identity: 9 Signals You Need an EMPI at the Core of Your Solution. This eBook dives into a wide variety of scenarios we see healthcare IT companies face when they haven’t implemented a high quality EMPI in their solution.
In this article, I’ll highlight two of the 9 signals in the eBook which stand out to me. The first is when your support queue spikes. The challenge with this one is that many companies don’t realize that this is a problem for their customers until it’s too late. Plus, most provider organizations aren’t designed for this type of spike in customer service calls. It creates a real pain point for hospitals and health systems that use your system because it stretches their support teams thin. No health IT vendor wants to be known as the software that’s difficult to support.
Extending that point is Signal #3 in the eBook From Data Chaos to Clean Identity: 9 Signals You Need an EMPI at the Core of Your Solution: Higher Churn and Lost Renewals.
As I mentioned, poor patient data matching and data anomalies inhibit the workflow, put patients at risk, and organizations are potentially liable for mistakes related to these errors. Over time, these issues add up and lead to customers who likely enjoy your software and are advocates for your solution to feel almost forced to start looking elsewhere.
A purpose built EMPI avoids these issues and builds trust with the user. What’s fascinating about this is that when your EMPI fails, it starts to sow the seeds of doubt in your customers’ minds. Your customer may reasonably consider, “If they can’t do identity matching well, what else are they not doing right?” This may be totally unfair since EMPI is challenging. However, once your solution fails your customer it starts to sow the seed of doubt in their minds about your competency as a vendor.
The good news is that there are a lot of great EMPI solutions out there including from the experts at Rhapsody. These solutions are built to be the hiddent layer that makes your patient identifcation work and avoid the pitfalls mentioned above and many others. When you see how sophisticated EMPI has gotten, it’s no wonder that a home grown EMPI effort would fall short.
Of course, I just highlighted 2 of the 9 signals shared in the eBook From Data Chaos to Clean Identity: 9 Signals You Need an EMPI at the Core of Your Solution. Go and download the free eBook to learn about the other 7 and evaluate if those are issues in your organization.
The reality is that modern healthcare platforms truly depends on identity management as the foundation of a great application and not just a feature added on after the fact. Creating that strong EMPI foundation reduces an organization’s risk, allows them to innovate, and earns trust with their customers.
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