Advancements in interoperability and data sharing have helped more providers share more data than ever before. But these developments come with a new set of challenges hospitals need to solve, particularly verifying patient identity to avoid medical errors and standardizing data formats.
In a webinar, sponsored by Verato, panelists including Providence Vice President of Peer Partnerships and Informatics Michael Westover and Yale New Haven Health System Chief Operation Officer Dr. Allen Hsiao discussed how their organizations are confronting these challenges. Jon Case, Verato Vice President of Product Management, served as the moderator.
Westover explained that a list of members of a value-based care contract or government program can include more than 70 different formats for the first and last names and date of birth. It delays the time it takes to get insights and provide information back to organizations such as payers that need their data in different formats. Data could also be missing or duplicated.
Hsiao talked about the contrast between the start of his career when sharing patient data was a cumbersome, time-consuming process, even within one hospital, to the complexities of managing a deluge of data today.
“There’s lots of sources of information coming in from other systems. You try to match the names. We have a wonderful Health Information Exchange in [Connecticut], but patients often will use nicknames or drop their middle names,” Hsiao said. “All of that matching is very, very challenging, especially when you’re trying to do things at a population health level.”
He added: “It would be wonderful if we had a national patient identifier number, like other countries, for quality and safety reasons, so we can then be confident that we have the right information for the right patient. That would be huge.”
The conversation also highlighted the role of the FHIR data standard for exchanging electronic health information and how the TEFCA program seeks to provide a standardized framework for data sharing, particularly for treatment use cases.
The discussion also touched on the need for aligned incentives between payers and providers to facilitate data sharing and the potential of patient-mediated data exchange to streamline processes.
Additional talking points include:
- The biggest disconnect between available data and real-world care delivery
- Complexity of managing hundreds of data sources and formats, including member rosters
- Transitioning from a lack of information to an overabundance of data
- Some of the care management issues caused by data interoperability
- The role of industry standards
- The role of AI
- How organizations can build a business case for improving identity-driven interoperability.
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