NextGate announced that Palmetto Health has deployed its Enterprise Master Patient Index (EMPI) to link patient records within and across 8 different source systems.
From an initial data set of 8.5 million medical records, the EMPI compared and cross-linked the records into a production ready master index of 2.1 million unique patient entries, enabling Palmetto Health to create a longitudinal view of patient care that now includes medical and provider history from across the community.
The EMPI uses probabilistic and configurable identity management algorithms to confidently and uniformly link patient records from disparate sources and therefore provides a source of truth to track a patient's past and future medical care.
As a result, Palmetto Health can equip caregivers with more reliable data to fuel collaboration and more informed care decisions.
The region's largest, most comprehensive, locally owned and governed, not-for-profit health resource, Palmetto Health treats over half a million patients each year at its seven acute-care hospitals, expansive physician practice network and dozens of affiliated clinics and specialty care practices.
The organization is dedicated to advancing health quality and patient safety, as well as providing care to patients with compassion, regardless of ability to pay.
To boost care quality and coordination, Palmetto Health recognized the need for a more comprehensive understanding of a patient's data history. Patient data are collected in different locations, stored in individual application systems and involve an increasing number of third party organizations.
Regardless of where the information comes from, the key to developing panoramic and patient-centered views of data is the ability to match records from these various systems to the same patient. Since data accuracy and quality can vary between Electronic Health Records and other types of data storage systems, Palmetto sought a trusted partner and proven technology to compare and reconcile data quickly.
Palmetto Health turned to the matching capabilities and integration strengths of NextGate's EMPI to unify demographic data into a single best record and create a common enterprise patient identifier.