QuadraMed: Holistic Solution to an Accurate Enterprise Master Person Index

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Mike Tardif, EVP

Did you know 18 per cent of patient records within healthcare organizations are duplicates, costing hospitals on average, $1,950 per inpatient stay? Are you aware that 33 percent of all denied claims are the result of inaccurate patient identification or information which causes the average hospital to lose upwards of $1.5 million annually in revenue? Risks aren’t only financial, patient safety is also negatively impacted when duplication errors occur. According to the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives, CHIME, one in five hospital CIOs linked at least one case of patient harm within the past year to an identify mismatch. Even in cases of a single electronic health record (EHR), duplicate patient records run rampant due to variable data-entry protocols between facilities and care delivery locations.

These problems grow exponentially as healthcare organizations merge, consolidate and add new IT systems. Successful hospitals and other healthcare organizations must reduce cost and patient safety risk associated with duplicate patient records through new technology, processes and procedures. One company leading innovation for more accurate patient matching is QuadraMed, a division of Harris Healthcare.

To prevent increasing duplicate rates, QuadraMed has come up with a holistic approach for establishing and maintaining an accurate enterprise MPI(EMPI) to facilitate a single medical record within large, integrated health networks.

We diagnose, treat, cure and prevent patient identification errors

QuadraMed’s flagship SmartID Platform performs real-time detection of duplicates and overlay records in an enterprise extensive patient search with 99 percent accuracy in matching patients. “We diagnose, treat, cure and prevent patient identification errors,” quotes Mike Tardif, EVP, QuadraMed. The company has a unique approach towards preventing duplicate records and is the only EMPI vendor with end to end patient identity management systems and services.

SmartScan, which is part of the SmartID Platform, is initially used for diagnosing patient identification errors. After the analysis is complete, Smart Cleanup is used to treat, cleanse and remediate. When people are just talking about only cleaning their system from duplicates, QuadraMed is ahead of the race by providing preventive software. “QuadraMed can be termed as one-stop-shop as it not only remediates existing problems but also brings the solution to prevent future duplicate and overlaid records from occurring by detecting them at the point of registration,” quotes Mike Tardif.

The company believes that with a lower possibility of creating duplicates at the front end, there will be fewer overall duplicate records in the system. This is ensured by creating a unique identifier for each patient irrespective of the department they visit or number of encounters that occur.

QuadraMed’s next initiative is to implement referential matching in conjunction with LexisNexis^®, a global provider of information and analytics. Specifically, QuadraMed’s EMPI data cleansing services will use LexisNexis Risk Solutions to expedite the resolution of unmatched patient identify or duplicate records reducing the cost and manual intervention required to maintain EMPI integrity.

Finally, QuadraMed doesn’t believe in a one size fits all policy and instead customizes the solution for each of their clients, as no two clients are the same. With 20 years of experience in the EMPI industry and remediating millions of patient identity issues, QuadraMed has marked a niche for itself in providing cost-effective solutions to clients in an efficient and timely manner.