Dive Brief:

• Healthix, the nation’s largest public health information exchange (HIE), will switch to software vendor Verato to improve its patient matching capabilities as it moves to a HITRUST-certified cloud infrastructure, Verato announced Tuesday.
• The switch is projected to save money for Healthix by eliminating annual hardware and software support and upgrade expenses and by reducing costs for manual data management and matching processes.
• Verato said its Universal master patient index (MPI) uses Referential Matching, the new gold standard in matching technology.

Dive Insight:

Patient matching software links identities across the databases of different healthcare organizations. Many patients see multiple doctors in different locations, but current methods of matching patients to their electronic health records (EHRs) are inadequate.

About one in five patient records is not accurately matched within the same healthcare system, according to research by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Mistakes can harm patients. Pew also said one in five hospital chief information officers linked at least one case of patient harm in a year to a mismatch.

Errors enter the system when a new record is created without being linked to the patient’s existing information. These unassigned records result in the duplication of patients in the system.

Healthix, with more than 16 million patients, connects hundreds of organizations across New York City and Long Island, from the largest hospital systems to small community health centers and physician practices.

It is replacing its IBM patient matching software with Verato’s, Modern Healthcare reports. Healthix first tapped Verato in 2016 to replace its existing patient matching software with a cloud-based plug-in that works with an existing EHR to resolve its most difficult match decisions. That system processes about 40,000 match decisions a day for Healthix and has significantly reduced the number of “potential duplicates” that were previously flagged for manual review, Verato said.

Once Verato becomes the primary service for Healthix, that number will increase to up to 1 million per day, the company said.

"It checks all the boxes: better performance, better security, better matching, and lower future cost," said Todd Rogow, Healthix chief information officer, in a statement.