Mastering Data Management

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When facing stretched budgets, make sure you're getting the most out of your EMPI.

Staying competitive in today’s healthcare market requires you to meet a shifting set of challenges. Healthcare coverage has evolved to be performance-based. Choice of services has become largely driven by customer preference, and costs have continued to escalate at an alarming rate.

Healthcare organizations are trying to maximize the value of existing technology and improve financial and clinical performance under tight fiscal constraints. For those who are already using an EMPI, it’s time to figure out how to do more with existing assets and infrastructure.

Don’t limit your EMPI to merely reducing duplicate records and improving patient identification. While essential functions for any medical facility, go beyond the traditional EMPI use. Have you considered these uses?:

Increased referrals - Extend registration and information sharing capabilities to EMR and physician practices outside your four walls

Improved physician satisfaction – Provide a system-wide view of medications, problems and allergies, accessible from inpatient and outpatient applications, including clinical portals

Increased EMR adoption – Improve user confidence by removing duplicate records and including information from additional contributing sources

Improved patient satisfaction – Provide quick and comprehensive point-of-service search during the registration process across all facilities and affiliated clinics

Identification and retention of high-value referring physicians – Create a system-wide view of providers and relate them to patient interactions and procedures

An extensible EMPI supports the long-term vision of interoperable health and is a foundation for realizing these goals. Connecting people and organizations to all of their associated data across all disparate clinical and administrative systems will improve operational processes and identify opportunities for increased revenue and improved quality. Before a case can be made for extending the EMPI, it’s important to remove any technological and business misperceptions about the capabilities required to achieve long-term interoperability goals.

Does Your EMPI Deliver?

Many organizations rely on embedded enterprise master patient indexes that are bundled with “single-solution” hospital information systems. These embedded EMPIs are typically tied to the architecture of the underlying HIS and are limited to managing communication within that system; they struggle to enable the cross-application communication required for interoperability.

While many of these goals are tempting, it’s essential to take a step back and ask the right questions. Some of the most common we’ve heard in the field have been along these lines:

• Can my EMPI enable communication of information across the continuum of care?
• Does my EMPI provide accurate identity matching to improve reliability of the data?
• Is my EMPI extensible enough to manage enterprise master data beyond the patient, including providers, organizations and members?
• Does my EMPI provide analytics to deliver insight into relationships within and across entities?

We’ll explore these questions in future posts, as well as considerations for each.

What has your EMPI experience been? Have you found any uses beyond these?