Improve the quality and efficiency of patient care
Hospitals need to ensure that their master patient index (MPI) or enterprise master patient index (EMPI) contains quality data: accurate, complete, and free of duplicates. It's essential for both quality medical care and efficient operations. What's more, a clean MPI/EMPI is an essential pre-requisite for creating an Electronic Hospital Record and for connecting to a Regional Health Information Network (RHIN) or a Regional Health Information Organization (RHIO).
How big a problem is data quality?
The master patient records of even the best-managed hospitals contain errors: patients move without updating their addresses, they get married and change their names, they mix-up their children's Social Security numbers. Hospital staff sometimes hears one thing and types another, makes mistakes reading handwriting, or enters data inconsistently.
At registration time, this often results in the creation of a duplicate record, as hospital staff can't find the original. In addition, duplicates propagate rapidly when data is fed into the MPI/EMPI from multiple systems - such as cardiology, radiology, patient accounting, or the lab. Some departments will use one Medical Record Number, others a different one. As well, "overlays" can get created: multiple patients with the same Medical Record Number.
Based on analysis of over 100 million patient records from healthcare organizations around the world, we've found that 23 percent of all EMPI records have errors in at least one of four basic fields, such as last name, first name, date of birth, and gender. This results in typical duplication rates for a single MPI of 8 - 12 percent. In a large organization, that can mean tens of thousands of duplicates! And Netrics has identified some institutions where duplicate rates were as high as 40%!
These data quality issues negatively affect both patient care and operational efficiency. For example, in one hospital surveyed, more than 4 percent of the confirmed duplicates resulted in some type of clinical impact. The most common issue identified was delay in initiating treatment in the ER. Other common quality issues identified included: - Duplicate tests ordered due to lack of access to previous test results. Most commonly these were radiology exams where the previous film was not available for comparison.
- Delay in surgery due to a lack of a history and physical at time patient presents for surgery.
- Pre-op visit on one medical record number and then surgery under the duplicate medical record number.
- Transport records under one medical record number, and then hospital stay under a second medical record number.
Netrics solves your EHR quality problems
Netrics solves your data quality problems by eliminating duplicates, overlays, and data errors throughout your MPI/EMPI-and providing a software solution to prevent data quality problems from recurring.
First, we offer a comprehensive set of MPI Data Analysis Services to assess your existing MPI/EMPI and provide a detailed report on the scope and type of problems we find. We routinely detect 30 to 75 percent more actual duplicates compared to in-house or third party service providers using conventional matching technology.
That's because the Netrics Matching Platform recognizes subtle similarities in the data, much the way human beings do. It can then automate a decision process learned from your own human experts, based on all of the information available in the data records, to decide if these similarities add up to a "dupe". The result is that more real matches are found automatically, with fewer false matches. We then work with your organization and solution providers to reconcile the duplicates, overlays, and other data problems to create a clean MPI/EMPI. |
