Valley Health System seeks better patient, record matching

Selection of NextGate for records management aims to ensure records are accurate and complete.


With population health management supported with analytics becoming a top priority for many healthcare organizations, so is the need to collect data and clean it of duplicate information to better identify and manage patients across all settings of care.

That is the impetus for Valley Health System in Ridgewood, N.J., which has selected enterprise identification company NextGate as its vendor for records management, says Michael Burke, assistant vice president of information systems.

“Incomplete or inaccurate data in one’s health record can be detrimental to patient safety and a major barrier to providing highly-coordinated and individualized care,” he asserts. “Safe and effective care management hinges on the ability to view a holistic, real-time portrait of patients during every encounter. NextGate’s platform will play a significant role in our transformational journey toward improved data exchange, provider collaboration and operational efficiency for value-based care success.”

Initially, 451-bed Valley Health—serving 440,000 residents in northern New Jersey and southern New York—will focus on using cleaner data to analyze and better understand the needs of patients with COPD, congestive heart failure and total joint replacement, and they’ll have the data to back up the level of quality given to patients and show it to insurers to get higher reimbursement.

Valley Health System considered three vendors for a suite of records matching software, conducted three demos with a focus on functionality. It selected NextGate because its services are healthcare-specific, the company was clearly more knowledgable than the other suitors, it had superior algorithms to support data analytics and clients they called spoke highly of the vendor, says Sean Samiljan, manager of application support.

Now comes the preparation and implementation phases for Valley Health System, which in mid-December had its first project kick-off meeting and will start having weekly meetings after the holidays.

The organization will self-host the NextGate software using its own hardware on the premises, says Burke. “We feel we have more control over our own data and analytics.”



Valley Health System is running reports to collect data and NextGate will assess the data to ensure it is ready for use. The organization has three electronic health record systems. The first is used to clean up duplicates and avoid duplicates. Next, registration staffers will get an EHR, and NextGate then will use the third EHR to help registration cut down on creation of duplicates.

Other recent contract wins and go-lives include:

* Northeast Georgia Medical Center in Gainesville, Ga., with three hospitals totaling 713 beds has selected the automated medication management platform of Omnicell to streamline workflow and use predictive intelligence to support enhanced medication management and pharmacy performance.

* Connect for Health Colorado, the state’s health insurance exchange, has partnered with Softheon, to enhance its existing enrollment platform with intuitive-guided shopping powered by decision support. The exchange is live and being used to enable residents to select new health plans during the 2019 Open Enrollment period.

* Mid-Valley Hospital, a 44-bed facility in OMAK, Washington, has picked Cerner as its next electronic health record vendor with the goal of managing outcomes to improve community health.

* Johns Hopkins Medicine has chosen Dragon Medical One, a speech recognition platform, and Dragon Medical Advisor, which helps improve physician productivity and quality metrics for reporting, both from Nuance Communications.

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