In order to provide high-value, coordinated patient care, health care organizations must have a comprehensive and accurate view of their patients. Missing or incorrect information can result in wasted spending on duplicated tests, or worse — cause patients serious harm.

A key source of incomplete patient records is poor patient identity management, the process by which a patient’s health record is maintained even if their identity attributes, such as last name or home address, change. Whether because of changes in a patient’s life or data entry discrepancies on the part of providers, patient identity attributes change frequently. If not properly maintained, matched, and linked across systems, such changes can result in duplicate and fragmented patient records.

These duplicate and partial records pose a massive administrative burden for health care entities, who must dedicate significant manual effort to reconciling them, often unsuccessfully. They also threaten patient safety and undermine ongoing nationwide efforts to facilitate more seamless data exchange between health systems. Estimates suggest that health systems’ attempts to exchange records about shared patients result in a successful match only approximately one out of every three times.

Verato has developed a set of cloud-based tools to help health care organizations automate the process of identifying duplicate records, reconciling them, and linking them across systems. Their unique approach, called “referential matching,” leverages publicly and commercially available data sources to improve the matching accuracy rates of traditional methods. Their solution has proven to drastically reduce the time and staff required for providers to reduce their matching backlogs while also improving the rate and accuracy of matching.