As every healthcare provider knows, each time you conduct a patient encounter, it is important that you gather information about your patient in order to treat them properly. The Enterprise Master Patient Index (EMPI) is the industry’s leading methodology for recording and treating patients with multiple medical needs. EMPI improves outcomes and patient care through seamless treatment of patients across the continuum of medical care while improving efficiency in processes, promoting practice strategy alignment, and improving compliance with individual regulatory agency requirements. EMPI leverages all critical information gathered in the clinical setting including demographics, diagnosis, problem list, medications, procedures performed and more. Using EMPI you can bring all potentially relevant patient records for a given encounter into one place-helping to facilitate delivery of seamless care.
Enterprise Master Patient Index
An enterprise master patient index or enterprise-wide master patient index is a database that is used across a healthcare organization to maintain consistent, accurate and current demographic and essential medical data on the patients seen and managed within its various departments. The patient is assigned a unique identifier that is used to refer to this patient across the enterprise. The objective is to ensure that each patient is represented only once across all the software systems used within the organization.
The essential patient data includes name, gender, date of birth, race and ethnicity, Aadhar number, current address and contact information, insurance information, current diagnoses, most recent date of hospital admission and discharge (if applicable), etc.
EMPIs are intended to solve the common problem where multiple systems across the organization gradually become inconsistent with respect to the patient’s most current data when the patient’s information changes, and only one system is updated, i.e., the changes are not propagated to others.
Key Identifiers
Last Name, First Name
Date of Birth
Administrative Sex
Address
Types of patient identification problems that compromise the integrity of the EMPI typically fall into one of the following categories:
- Duplicates: Two or more medical record numbers for one single patient.
- Overlays: Two or more patients are assigned one record number.
- Overlaps: Patients seen at multiple facilities have overlapping medical record numbers at each facility within an enterprise or integrated delivery network.
The EMPI is adaptable to a variety of healthcare architectures, including Health Information Exchanges the others.
EMPI services should include:
- Data Cleansing
- Data Normalization
- Data Standardization
- Recognize at all points of service
- Improve quality of care by accurately locating and linking demographic information
- Improve clinician satisfaction by providing more trusted and accurate patient identification at the point of service
- Quickly create applications powered by patient data that can be used to solve standalone problems or can be embedded into existing applications
Build a foundation for growth with a highly scalable solution that can be extended to include a single view of providers, healthcare organizations, etc.
Approach:
- Business Process Understand the business processes and existing infrastructure
- Training Train the users / developers on how to use or build an EMPI system
- Technology Work with existing technology or provide a framework to establish query response with the EMPI engine
Algorithms and Identifiers:
EMPI needs to use various algorithms to establish a single patient index, the most frequently used and the one that we recommend is levenshtein, also along with the algorithm there needs to be a an identifiers setup which will determine and index the patient.
Jaro Winkler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaro%E2%80%93Winkler_distance
Levenshtein: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance