• Background: The Children’s Hospital is a private, not-for-profit pediatric healthcare network with medical progras and specialists who are consistently ranked among the very best.
• Challenge: Reduce duplicate records and establish an Enterprise Master Person Index (EMPI) to help increase patient safety and maximize care.
• Solution: Deploy Initiate software to improve data integrity and enable accurate, on-demand data linking.
• Results: Streamlined medical records processes and new accurate search techniques enabling registration staff to quickly and correctly identify patients.

The Children’s Hospital is a private, not-for-profit pediatric healthcare network dedicated to improving the health of children through the provision of high-quality, coordinated programs of patient care, education, research and advocacy. Children’s provides care to the region at its main campus and through a network of care, including four community-based urgent and emergency care sites and seven specialty-care centers providing principally rehabilitation services. It is consistently ranked among the nation’s very best Children’s Hospitals by U.S. News & World Report, Child Magazine and other publications.

Expansive and intricate integration project

Children’s Hospital has 236 operational beds, maintains 1.3 million records and performs 3,000 transactions per day.

Hospital administrators and IS staff wanted to significantly reduce the number of duplicate patient records, upgrade their legacy systems to include more comprehensive integration among several systems and establish an Enterprise Master Person Index (EMPI).

Since the hospital is a round-the-clock organization, Children’s needed the ability to continue to provide optimal patient care while still accessing and updating patient information. They needed to have the right tools to ensure patient data was linked together properly while also providing critical information about where and why duplicates may be occurring.

To help them solve their challenges, Children’s turned to Initiate Systems to implement Initiate software, an EMPI solution that helps healthcare organizations leverage the investment already made in core applications and patient information. Within Children’s existing process flows, Initiate software assisted Children’s by actively integrating its search techniques and data store with its applications.

Cutting down on duplicates

Children’s legacy patient search tools lacked the advanced algorithms necessary to quickly and accurately identify established patients. Without these tools, patient registration staff would at times create a completely new record for a patient. Having multiple records for the same patient makes it difficult for the healthcare staff person to adequately care for a patient. Without consistent health records and up-to-date medical information, detailed health history may not be available when a doctor recommends a test or treatment, therefore enabling an informed diagnosis to become much more difficult. For Children’s, developing an EMPI system was the ideal solution, for they needed a system that could help eliminate errors that occurred in the registration process and form a tighter integration with their existing applications.

“We wanted to dramatically cut back on our duplicates to facilitate patient care,” notes Sharon Dody, project manager for Children’s. “Duplicate records reduce the efficiency of our staff, potentially reduce the quality of patient care and increase the time it takes for our medical records staff to update information. Through the Initiate software, we created a means to cleanly transfer our records to the EMPI while also maintaining accuracy.”
Children’s Hospital benefits from EMPI system

Initiate Systems worked with Children’s to establish an EMPI with the following benefits:

• Improved accuracy in pinpointing duplicates
• Faster management and correction of duplicates, before patient records are circulated throughout the hospital
• Better access to complete and accurate patient information from the EMPI
• Improved tools for patient registration staff without increasing the time for registration
• Streamlined workload for the medical records department
• Reduced cost of cleaning up duplicates

The sophisticated algorithms of Initiate software also enabled Children’s to pinpoint complicated duplicates such as records of adopted children. This was important because if a child is in the system and then is adopted, their name is changed. The EMPI system can pinpoint the duplicate by using information such as a birth date, and historical demographic information.

A huge success for Children’s Hospital

With the implementation of Initiate software, Initiate Systems delivered a solution that helped Children’s streamline their medical records processes, significantly reduce their duplicate patient records and avoid future duplication while at the same time leveraging their previous investments in core applications and patient information. All this was accomplished without an interruption in patient care.

As Children’s looks to the future, they plan to share more comprehensive patient identity information throughout the hospital and along the continuum of care. The EMPI would serve as a building block to a clinical physician order entry system and electronic medical records for all of Children’s patients which will help increase patient safety and enable their staff to deliver an even higher level of care to the children of the Denver metropolitan area.