The San Mateo County Health System Selects NextGate’s EMPI Patient Matching Solution for its Eight Division Health System
NextGate’s top KLAS-rated EMPI product will become the foundation for the San Mateo County Health System’s clinical and population health management efforts, business intelligence initiatives and Health Information Exchange activities
PASADENA, Calif. – September 26, 2016 – NextGate, the leading healthcare technology company for patient and provider identification, announced today that the San Mateo County Health System chose NextGate’s #1 KLAS-rated EMPI, implementation services and software support as the foundation for better data and patient identity management in San Mateo County. The San Mateo County Health System (SMCHS), through its due diligence, selected NextGate as the partner and solution to provide an Enterprise Master Person Index (EMPI) patient matching solution as a strategic component for its clinical and population health management efforts and health information exchange activities.
Through NextGate’s EMPI, SMCHS will provide and maintain a single, longitudinal identifier (known as an Enterprise Unique Identifier number or EUID) for patients that receive services from any one or more divisions within SMCHS. This identity management foundation will maximize the quality of patient care services, bringing greater value to the San Mateo County and citizens.
The Health System environment contains multiple electronic health record (EHR) and data collection software applications to support the SMCHS divisions. SMCHS sought a vendor partner that can connect and integrate with its varying technology systems, with 6 EHRs that will participate in the EMPI.
“This opportunity to bring market-leading technology to the physicians, patients and community of San Mateo will rapidly advance data quality that the physicians and care teams can trust during their patient interactions,” remarks Andy Aroditis, Founder and Chief Executive Officer at NextGate. “Through this partnership, we are confident that the data integrity will surpass expectations, bringing matched, accurate and clean patient records into the multiple San Mateo electronic health record systems, hospitals, and divisions.”
Following the implementation of the NextGate EMPI, SMCHS will implement a clinical data repository (CDR) and data sharing among Health divisions as well as community partners. To standardize and improve the accuracy of registration for all systems, SMCHS plans to search for patients in the EMPI, rather than the local application database. By doing so, all patient records in the EMPI that contain similar search criteria can be searched, regardless of which participating system originally submitted them. This process significantly increases the probability of finding the patient record, and nearly eliminates the possibility of creating accidental duplicate records.
“We commend SMCHS for prioritizing patient identity as the foundation for measurable clinical and population health management improvement,” adds Andy. “An accurately matched and identified patient from a single hospital or across multiple care sites will improve provider collaboration, drive efficiencies in administrative work and prove invaluable in delivering higher quality patient experiences.”
Using HL7 and custom message formats, transactions are exchanged with the EMPI through the NextGate Message Server which supports PIX/PDQ and many other integration methods. Tuned to the unique San Mateo Country population, the sophisticated NextGate EMPI technology compares records to determine if they are duplicates, unique, or potentially a duplicate. An intuitive management console allows authorized users to merge, unmerge, and edit EMPI records.
The NextGate EMPI assembles a “Golden Record” for the patient which consists of the most accurate and up to date information collected from the external systems. An enterprise unique patient identifier (EUID) is assigned to each patient, and is distributed to consuming systems as appropriate, giving all systems a common reference when referring to the same patient. Once the EUID is established, it becomes the foundational “patient key” for the County’s other departments and future projects to support additional data management and global data governance objectives.
About the San Mateo County Health System:
The Health System is the largest department in San Mateo County, employing 2,200 staff with an operating budget of $700 million. There are 10 divisions in the Health System, each with unique responsibilities, programs, and services. The divisions within the Health System are:
• Aging and Adult Services (AAS)
• Behavioral Health and Recovery Services (BHRS)
• Correctional Health Services (CHS)
• Emergency Medical Services (EMS)
• Environmental Health (EH)
• Family Health Services (FHS)
• Health Administration (HA)
• Health Information Technology (HIT)
• Public Health Policy and Planning (PHPP)
• San Mateo Medical Center (SMMC)
For more information, visit SMCHealth.org.
About NextGate
NextGate helps connect the healthcare ecosystem by accurately identifying and linking patient and provider data from different applications. NextGate’s iDAS (Intelligent Data Aggregation Server) solution framework leverages the company’s industry-leading identity management technology to organize and relate data from enterprise systems to provide a more complete and accurate view of the total healthcare experience.
At the core of this architecture is NextGate’s KLAS Category Leader EMPI technology which currently manages more than 175 million lives. It is deployed by successful healthcare systems and health information exchanges around the globe. For more information, visit NextGate.com.
