Mastering Data Management

Make sure you're ready for meaningful use with these tips.

Drastic measures, like scrapping existing systems or locking in with a single vendor to achieve “meaningful use” are expensive, resource intensive and won’t necessarily get you where you need to be by 2011.

Using electronic health records in a meaningful way, regardless of what the final definition turns out to be, requires an interoperability infrastructure that enables secure information sharing and a movement toward patient-centric, coordinated care across a heterogeneous set of systems and applications.  It doesn’t require a complete overhaul of your IT shop, and it doesn’t require a single vendor approach.

One cost-effective and sensible action you can take toward interoperability is to implement a sophisticated Enterprise Master Person Index (EMPI) as part of your infrastructure.  Not all EMPIs are created equal however.

The four basic criteria to look for to effectively aggregate patient identities across disparate systems include:

1)      Flexible integration options to enable information sharing across the continuum of care

2)       Accurate and scalable identity matching to aggregate differing views of the patient across disparate systems

3)      Extendable platform to manage beyond patients including providers and their relationships

4)      Smarter analytics to drive insight into your business

To get more details on these points, I encourage you to read the whitepaper EMPI: A Building Block for Interoperability.

Not only does the EMPI improve your business, it helps meet the goals articulated in the meaningful use matrix in the following ways:

-          Improve Quality, Safety and Efficiency: Reporting on quality will require timely and accurate aggregation of patient data across systems

-          Engage Patients and Families: Providing patients with electronic access to medical records requires the ability to accurately identify the right patient and link all records about a patient correctly

-          Improve Care Coordination: Exchanging key clinical data across providers requires the ability to accurately link records across disparate systems to create a comprehensive view for the EHR, portal or EMR

-          Improve Population and Public Health: Reporting chronic illnesses and immunization status requires the ability to accurately identify patients over time and across many geographically dispersed systems

-          Ensure Privacy and Security Protections: Allowing users to access medical records requires strict security and access controls and an ability to accurately identify the patient to protect patient privacy