Matching – HLN Consulting, LLC

HLN Updates White Paper on IIS/EHR Feature Overlap

by Noam Arzton April 11, 2018

Immunization Information Systems (IIS) have been around for more than twenty years. Their functionality, completeness, and usefulness have all increased over this time. IIS and electronic health record (EHR) systems have always had unique features, as well as some overlapping features, and the deployment of EHRs has enhanced the local immunization capabilities of clinician practices. Several critical clinical features that are considered to be core functions of IIS are beginning to be supported by EHRs.

IIS and EHR Feature Overlap, originally published in 2014, reviews and discusses five such critical features. The paper offers insight into the likelihood and implications of their migration from IIS to EHR, and offers recommendations to both the IIS and EHR communities for how to thoughtfully guide this migration. The proliferation of EHR with funding from the CMS EHR Incentive Programs has in some cases exacerbated the feature overlap. Both IIS and EHR projects should consider wisely investments in these functional areas, considering the potential for overlap as well as the on-hand expertise to develop, support these feature.

Update on Patient Matching Activities

by Noam Arzton December 14, 2017

I have written several times about patient matching in the US, both in a blog entry and a published article. On December 11, 2017 the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) sponsored a half-day “Interoperability in Action” webinar focused on Patient Matching Milestones at ONC (see agenda and slides). The webinar focused on four ONC projects from the past year. Here’s a quick run-down on what they covered.

New Article Published: Is There a National Strategy Emerging for Patient Matching in the US?

by Noam Arzton April 18, 2017

New article by Dr. Noam Arzt published in Medical Research Archives:

Is There a National Strategy Emerging for Patient Matching in the US?

Patient record matching has been a key area of emphasis for healthcare, with several major efforts to identify best practices in the past decade. Because of a lack of a national patient identifier, several distinct approaches to patient matching in both the public and private sectors have emerged, which do not appear to be converging. One major focus of a number of patient matching initiatives is the identification of a core set of data elements found in most patient records, regardless of setting, to facilitate matching. These initiatives have also not yet converged. Some organizations participate in master patient index (MPI) deployments within their agency or jurisdiction. But participation in a shared MPI can also be challenging, and policies and processes for synchronizing record changes, among other issues, must be carefully considered. “Promising practices” should be identified from those jurisdictions that have lived through a migration to an enterprise MPI.

http://journals.ke-i.org/index.php/mra/article/view/1150

Patient Matching and HIE: Do We Even Have a Strategy?

by Noam Arzton February 2, 2016

Accurate patient matching continues to be a challenge in healthcare, especially in an HIE environment (see my earlier HIMSS posting). No simple solution appears to be at hand. The issue is also inextricably linked to issues of patient identity which are also difficult to solve at our current level of technology. Several approaches have emerged, however, which do not yet seem to be converging. I would characterize the major approaches as follows: