IDSentry™ Drives Truman Medical’s Duplicate Rate Below 2%
By Karen Proffitt, Vice President of Data Integrity Solutions, MHIIM, RHIA, CHP
As duplicate record rates continue to climb to as high as 12% across the healthcare industry, Missouri’s Truman Medical Centers hoped to avoid a similar fate, setting a goal under 2% for the duplicate volume in its master patient index (MPI).
There were issues, however. Truman’s lack of a credible means for tracking duplicates meant the Health Information Management (HIM) department was unsure if it was hitting its mark. Truman also had just one data integrity specialist on staff responsible for identifying and remediating duplicate records — a primarily manual process that was painstakingly slow, averaging about four minutes per record and 18 merges per day. It didn’t make things easier that duplicate reports came in from multiple channels, including help desk tickets, email, the organization’s Sharepoint site and, of course, the reporting mechanism built into its EHR system.
“We also had to wait for IT to send us the duplicate report from Cerner, which we then dropped into a spreadsheet to work from,” said Anna Brown, Director of Health Data & Integrity for TMC/UH. “As a result, we weren’t finding duplicates as quickly as we would have liked.”
Knowing there had to be a better and more efficient way of cleaning and maintaining its MPI, Truman Medical Centers turned to Just Associates and our patient matching solution, IDSentry™.
Designed specifically for acute care hospitals and integrated delivery networks whose EHR systems use basic or intermediate fuzzy-matching techniques, IDSentry leverages a powerful advanced algorithm that identifies more true duplicates than other systems—even when multiple discrepancies exist across patient demographic data. It also offers superior workflow features that reduce required resources and accelerate productivity.
Truman now had the ability to accurately track its duplicate rate — which was at 4% — and was able to streamline and accelerate the overall duplicate resolution process, dropping it from four minutes to three. Consequently, Truman’s rate of duplicates began to dip, hitting an all-time low of 0.8% during one month before setting in between 1% and 2%.
IDSentry has not only helped Truman accurately track, identify, and resolve duplicates, but it has done so efficiently enough that the data integrity specialist was able to take on the new task of managing data flowing in from the recently implemented emergency medical services system.
Once the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic settles, Truman plans to leverage IDSentry to proactively address the creation of duplicates through targeted refreshers, education and/or training on proper procedures — a step that would not be possible without IDSentry taking the guesswork and most of the duplicates out of its MPI maintenance.
“When things settle down, we will start to provide proactive feedback to departments that need it,” said Brown. “We could not do that without IDSentry.”
Read the full case study here.
