Definition
In computing, and enterprise master patient index is a form of customer data integration (CDI) specific to the healthcare industry. Healthcare organizations or groups of them will implement EMPI to identify, match, merge, de-duplicate, and cleanse patient records to create a master index that may be used to obtain a complete and single view of a patient. The EMPI will create a unique identifier for each patient and maintain a mapping to the identifiers used in each records' respective system.
An EMPI will typically provide an Application Programming Interface (API) for searching and querying the index to find patients and the pointers to their identifiers and records in the respective systems. It may also store some subset of the attributes for the patient so that it may be queried as an authoritative source of the "single most accurate record" or "source of truth" for the patient. Registration or other practice management applications may interact with the index when admitting new patients to have the single best record from the start, or may have the records indexed at a later time.
An EMPI may additionally work with or include enterprise application integration (EAI) capabilities to update the originating source systems of the patient records with the cleansed and authoritative data.
A key component of an EMPI is the match engine. A match engine may be deterministic or probabilistic. The match engine must be configured and tuned for each implementation to minimize the false matches and unmatches. The accuracy and performance of the match engine are a big factor in determining the value and ROI for an EMPI solution.
The attributes a match engine is configured to use will typically include name, date of birth, sex, social security number, address and more. The match engine must be able to give consideration to typos, misspellings, transpositions, aliases, and more.
Even the best tuned EMPI will not be 100% accurate. Thus an EMPI will provide a data stewardship interface for reviewing the match engine results, handling records for which the engine does not definitively determine a match or not. This interface will provide for performing search, merge, unmerge, edit and numerous other operations. This interface may also be used to monitor the performance of the match engine and perform periodic audits on the quality of the data.
Organizations that would use an EMPI include hospitals, medical centers, outpatient clinics, physician offices, rehabilitation facilities, etc.
Read more about this topic: Enterprise Master Patient Index
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