Health information exchange streamlines patient matching process

CORHIO, a health information exchange (HIE) covering more than 5 million patients across Colorado and surrounding states, will enlist patient and customer matching solutions to add more types of health data to its network.

CORHIO has chosen Verato’s SaaS-based solutions to improve patient matching. CORHIO’s enterprise master patient index (EMPI) technology will be integrated with Verato’s Referential Matching to help the health information exchange better resolve duplicates.

Robert Denson, CORHIO CIO, says, “We were faced with a decision: either go down the path of investing an enormous amount of effort on enhanced patient matching or look for a different approach. This approach had to not only thrive in our environment of diverse patient data with different governance standards, but it had to handle new data sources without any reconfiguration. Verato fit all these criteria.”

According to Verato, the effectiveness of its Referential Matching approach was shown during a pilot in which it discovered and resolved duplicates in CORHIO’s enterprise master patient index. Its cloud-based platform links and matches identities across disparate databases or organizations.

Verato CEO Mark LaRow says, “Patient matching is one of the largest challenges faced by HIEs because they have little control over the quality, completeness or standardization of the patient data they receive from their participants. Not only do HIEs inevitably receive duplicate patient records from each participant, but the differences in data governance between participants dramatically increase the challenge of identifying and matching common patients.”