NextGate, the leading healthcare technology company for patient and provider identity management, announced today that Palmetto Health is using NextGate’s Enterprise Master Patient Index (EMPI) to link patient records within and across 8 different source systems. From an initial data set of 8.5 million medical records, the EMPI compared and cross-linked the records into a production ready master index of 2.1 million unique patient entries, enabling Palmetto Health to create a longitudinal view of patient care that now includes medical and provider history from across the community. The EMPI uses probabilistic and configurable identity management algorithms to confidently and uniformly link patient records from disparate sources and therefore provides a source of truth to track a patient’s past and future medical care. As a result, Palmetto Health can equip caregivers with more reliable data to fuel collaboration and more informed care decisions.
The region’s largest, most comprehensive, locally owned and governed, not-for-profit health resource, Palmetto Health treats over half a million patients each year at its seven acute-care hospitals, expansive physician practice network and dozens of affiliated clinics and specialty care practices. The organization is dedicated to advancing health quality and patient safety, as well as providing care to patients with compassion, regardless of ability to pay.
To boost care quality and coordination, Palmetto Health recognized the need for a more comprehensive understanding of a patients’ data history. Patient data are collected in different locations, stored in individual application systems and involve an increasing number of third party organizations. Regardless of where the information comes from, the key to developing panoramic and patient-centered views of data is the ability to match records from these various systems to the same patient. Since data accuracy and quality can vary between Electronic Health Records and other types of data storage systems, Palmetto sought a trusted partner and proven technology to compare and reconcile data quickly.
Palmetto Health turned to the matching capabilities and integration strengths of NextGate’s EMPI to unify demographic data into a single best record and create a common enterprise patient identifier.
About Palmetto Health
Palmetto Health, the largest health care system in the South Carolina Midlands region and one of the state’s largest employers, comprises more than 14,000 team members, physicians and volunteers working together to fulfill Palmetto Health’s Vision: To be remembered by each patient as providing the care and compassion we want for our families and ourselves. The system includes six acute-care hospitals in the Midlands—Palmetto Health Baptist, Palmetto Health Baptist Parkridge, Palmetto Health Children’s Hospital, Palmetto Health Heart Hospital, Palmetto Health Richland and Palmetto Health Tuomey. In the South Carolina Upstate region, Palmetto Health also co-owns Baptist Easley Hospital. Recognized nationally as one of the best places to work and receive care, the system also includes the Palmetto Health-USC Medical Group, the region’s largest multispecialty group, which serves as the entry point to the health care system with more than 500 providers serving patients in more than 80 practices and nearly 100 locations. Palmetto Health also is supported by two 501 (c)(3) foundations, and trains the next generation of physicians through its 24 residency and fellowship programs affiliated with the University of South Carolina School of Medicine. For more information, visit PalmettoHealth.org or call 803-296-CARE (2273).
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. NextGate’s KLAS Category Leader EMPI technology currently manages more than 175 million lives and is deployed by the nation’s most successful healthcare systems and health information exchanges. For more information, visit NextGate.com.
