Medical labs meeting today's challenges with Initiate software for Healthcare

The quest for on-demand patient data integration through an Enterprise Master Person Index (EMPI) can be impaired—even derailed—if it is powered by fragmented or inaccurate information. Medical labs especially face this challenge, as they must compile information from multiple disparate sources to enable a single, complete view for each patient and their medical history and tests. Since each source tracks patients using different identifiers and practices, merely merging patient information to create a data warehouse is not enough. Traditional EMPI solutions are not only costly and disruptive to your business processes; the newly-merged data that is accurate on "Day One" also will require substantial ongoing management resources to remain accurate.

Some EMPI solutions physically merge data into a single data warehouse or use a master list of unique identifiers that can be associated with a patient and a limited set of historical information. These approaches require additional overhead to manage the unique identifiers, and they only work when the information is continually updated. With better on-demand data integration, you can get a complete picture of each patient for each visit—including the demographic information that's required on requisition forms—which minimizes delayed or re-worked billing. This can save most clinical labs millions of dollars per year and help ensure that your billing is processed within your allowable timeframe.

Because your business revolves around people, it's not only important that you recognize your patients for operational reasons, but also important from both a patient relationship and HIPAA compliance standpoint. Your patients have the right to see their complete record every time they visit your facility. Informatics require you to match patients to clinical results, ensuring that multiple repeat tests on the same patient are reported in a statistically relevant manner. What's more, patient communications can suffer when multiple lab records for the same patient lead to repeat, identical communications with that patient—this is costly for you and disconcerting to your patient.

A true patient data integration solution requires total access to up-to-the-moment information from across all of your information sources in real time. But the barriers to achieving this are real:

• Patient data is fed from multiple sources and systems , each using varying methods of tracking data
• Informatics are often processed passively in batch mode, inhibiting real-time disease management
• Hospitals often use their own unique identifiers, making it difficult to match to your lab's database of tests to the hospitals database of patients
• Patient and provider names are often misspelled; records are often incomplete and outdated
• Provider information can be fragmented and contain duplicate medical records for a single practitioner who may have both group and solo practices and multiple state license and tax ID numbers
• Organizational issues often impede standardization and/or change
• Traditional data integration processes are costly and invasive and can cause disruption

The foundation for supporting on-demand patient data integration

Initiate software for Healthcare, the leading Enterprise Master Person Index, can be the lifeblood of your patient data integration strategy. We can leverage the data from across your network to create the clean, complete patient profiles you need to ensure accuracy, streamline billing and reporting processes, drive profitability, improve patient care and achieve more consistent HIPAA compliance.

Our products and services give you a strategy to manage patient identities and related information on demand, and the technology to achieve outstanding results every day, regardless of how your organization changes. We enable you to dynamically link all of the records about the same patient across your systems and sources without physically merging or integrating your data. This enables you to provide access to patient information when and where it's needed, without forcing you to move large quantities of data, standardize systems or manage patient IDs. Simply stated, our patient data hub approach is the most accurate, scalable, non-invasive, efficient, proven method for instantly linking all of your records about each of your patients across your network.

Initiate software enables medical laboratories to:

• Create a trusted system of record for your entire enterprise, including your affiliated hospitals, clinics and other sources
• Leverage your existing infrastructure while minimizing ongoing maintenance and management cost
• Improve billing efficiencies and decrease the incidence of duplicate tests due to mismatched patient records
• Better support HIPAA and state-level regulations
• Improve informatics accuracy and relevance by providing up-to-date information on demand
• Enable individual data "owners" to maintain control of their information at the facility or clinic level
• Achieve higher accuracy with the most effective statistical data identity methods

We deliver:

• The most accurate results on demand, regardless of volume
• The ability to make decisions about the level and cost of data quality
• New insight for your organizational and patient care needs
• Data profiling and basic set-up in under one month
• The scalability and flexibility to add sources as need be, whether through mergers or acquisitions or through sheer growth
• All without forcing you to move large quantities of data, standardize systems or manage unique patient identifiers

 Learn more about Initiate software.