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Health System Achieves 360-Degree View of Patient Through Master Data Management
Health system consolidates patient profiles across multiple EMR systems, creating a golden patient record with Multi-Domain MDM
Praveen Sivakumar, Engagement Manager, IQVIA Healthcare Informatics
Apr 14, 2021

A Midwest health system, ABC Health, has been purchasing other hospitals to expand their reach. As they acquired new facilities, they faced the daunting task of needing to consolidate data from the systems at each of the facilities.

ABC Health chose an Enterprise Master Patient Index (EMPI) application to identify patient data matches from the two hospital systems that they were combining, using a reference dataset to classify and categorize data. The referential data was then matched against data in a Referential Data Repository and assigned a unique EMPI identifier. The Referential Data Repository collected patient data from numerous sources, such as credit bureaus, advertising, hospital fundraising, and marketing outreach to make a match. However, there still wasn’t an easy way for the EMPI to consolidate the patient profiles, therefore, the health system was still lacking a “single source of truth” from which to operate.

While the EMPI application provided basic matching functionality to identify duplications, there was no easy way for the application to consolidate the matched patient profiles. ABC Health needed a Master Data Management (MDM) solution to achieve their goal of having a single source of truth for its data. Although the EMPI’s referential match identified duplicates, it still lacked the content and capability to provide a 360-degree view into the data.

A multi-domain MDM System allows customers to configure what is needed to match existing and future patient profiles. In addition, business-driven data rules help make and surface matching decisions from within the MDM environment itself. A multi-domain MDM System achieves a 360-degree view, showing the health system relationships, associations, and roles into its data, including:

  • The synching of health system and consumer data, which improves the availability of data in almost real-time.
  • Fresh data means the business users of the integrated systems see the same version of the data, driving efficiency into the decision-making process.
  • MDM and EMPI application integration leverages referential matching.
  • EMPI and MDM matching leads to quality master patient index results.

For ABC Health, multi-domain MDM that integrated the EMPI application, internal systems, and the data used by the providers into a single operational dataset created their single source of truth, or what they called their “golden record.”

Although EMPI applications can help consolidate patient data, not all EMPI vendors offer data clean-up and/or enrichment services. Leading health systems don’t merely stop at the EMPI to achieve their data objectives, they also use MDM to improve versioning, maintain data integrity, provide robust analytics, and support consumer capabilities.

For organizations that don’t have an EMPI, consider starting instead with a multi-domain MDM strategy that can be tailored to meet the requirements of different functional business areas and can also address the basic functionality of an EMPI.

IQVIA understands the importance of helping health systems define the right MDM strategy for their organization, manage these complex data systems, clean the data utilized in each environment, and provide supplemental enrichment services. Let us know how we can help.

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