Referential Matching: A Powerful New Technology to Improve CORHIO HIE

CORHIO recently announced a partnership with Verato to continue to improve patient matching, as we work to incorporate more types of health data into the HIE network, such as social determinants of health, images, prescribed medicines and behavioral health data. Verato will integrate with CORHIO’s enterprise master patient index (EMPI) technology and use Referential Matching to help CORHIO’s EMPI better resolve duplicates by providing more data on which to initially match.

To resolve what appears to be duplicates, Verato’s Referential Matching approach compares the demographic data from patient records to a comprehensive and continuously updated reference database of over 300 million identities. If records match to the same identity in the reference database, then they match to each other.

This reference database spans the entire U.S. population and each identity contains a complete profile of demographic data spanning the past 30 years—including nicknames, aliases, maiden names, common typos, past phone numbers, and old addresses. The demographic data is sourced from commercially available sources, like telco records, government and legal records, and credit header data from credit agencies. Tens of thousands of person-hours of data science and engineering ensure that the correct demographic data is associated with the correct identity in the reference database.

All of this means that even if one patient record contains a person’s maiden name, old address, and phone number, and another record has that person’s married name, current address, and birthdate, both records will accurately match to the same identity in the reference database.

With three billion demographic records to match to and 60 million updates made per month, Verato’s Referential Matching approach has a 98% success rate on patient matching.

Stay tuned for more updates and outcomes of CORHIO adopting this new technology to help providers improve patient care in Colorado.