Mastering Data Management

Entity resolution can help unravel the knot of agency data

Today, most data is tied to an application or specific database and, as a result, exists in a stovepipe. Take a familiar example — a patient at a health treatment facility. Multiple applications exist within that environment. Some applications are high-level, such as registration, billing and pharmacy, while others are highly specialized on a departmental basis, such as radiology.

Chances are the patient has records in many of these applications throughout the various organizations within the health treatment facility. But, who or what has the holistic view of the patient as a person?

All this information is about the same person— or entity — yet each piece of data is tied to a different application. And each application is only interested in the information it needs; it does not keep information it does not need.

There is a strong likelihood that none of these individual applications, departments or organizations has all the available information on this person. It is likely that there is no complete picture — or “golden record” — of this entity anywhere in any of these systems.

The importance of a single view of a patient becomes critical in the case of a medical allergy, for example, particularly when the patient is highly allergic to what may be the most commonly used treatment. Everyone within the chain of care needs to know this.

This is precisely the challenge entity resolution solves. Entity resolution technology de-couples data from its source application and allows information from different applications to be shared and exchanged in order to create a single, trusted record of a defined entity. The technology becomes an enabler in transitioning from a system-centric to an entity-centric environment.

It is important to note that within this entity-centric environment the contributing source systems retain control of the data, including control over security rights and regulations.

In other words, a contributing application supplies only select data — records and attributes, for example — which then combine with select data from other contributing applications to create a single, accurate record of the entity. Each application can then “consume” the information within this golden record, consistent with existing security levels and access rights.

Note that no changes in terms of data model, ownership or authorship are required. Yet, once each designated source system contributes to the entity resolution data set, each operational system or consuming application reaps the benefits of a resolved entity.

Once the entities of interest are resolved, relationships within and between the entities can be identified and acted on. Techniques can be applied against such data to identify associations and connections where none were obvious before.