An Interesting EMPI Use Case with Epic and Meditech
At NextGate we spend a fair amount of time talking with customers and prospects about their challenges with managing patient records and as you would expect, we hear some different use cases from time to time. Not every EMPI implementation is the standard initial load from 3 systems matching records to remove duplicates, and then receive updates and match records as patients are registered or their records get updated.
I had the opportunity to visit a medical center this week where they had slightly different challenge. They are a long time Meditech user and it is used throughout the hospital for registration and billing and is core to their operations. There are some clinics and other facilities that use other systems but the volume is low enough that they simply perform a duplicate registration in Meditech at the end of each day.
The challenge is that they will be implementing Epic at one of their larger facilities, and cannot afford to perform the manual duplicate registration with the volumes present at this facility. However, given the investment in and dependence on Meditech for running the business, they still must get these patients and their registrations into Meditech. The process they are looking for is to be able to perform the registration in Epic but have it search against the total user population and use existing information to streamline the registration, but also retrieve the unique patient ID used by Meditech so that the two systems are “linked” from the beginning. If it is a new patient, the registration should cause a new patient registration in Meditech automatically as well.
We were able to outline to them how with an Enterprise Master Patient Index (EMPI) they could maintain the single view of the patient they want, but furthermore implement an active integration with Epic so that the EMPI is searched at registration to get the benefits of searching the entire population, the results from a probabilistic search are returned improving productivity, and the linkage to the Meditech identifier can be made immediately. This solution will save them time and money and allow them to continue to reuse their existing investment in Meditech, but also lay the foundation to implement similar solutions with other EMR or patient management systems and allow them to reap the benefits of having that patient centric view in the EMPI.
If you have unique challenges with integrating the systems you have for managing patient records, let us know and we’ll show you how we can help.
