EMPI helps Colorado network better identify vulnerable residents

VisionWare lets provider collaborative obtain a single view of patients and manage costs, says Jason Greer.


The Colorado Community Managed Care Network, comprising 20 community health centers and more than 200 clinic sites that include school-based clinics and pharmacies, is making a push to improve population health management and the health status of the state’s safety net population of uninsured, Medicaid-covered and other vulnerable individuals.

“We are building a digital safety net to protect patients and providers and make sure no one falls through the cracks,” says Jason Greer, CEO at the Denver-based network. “We want to work with healthcare businesses, healthcare communities, payers and public health agencies to help support Colorado families.”

For example, on the business side, providers know they have to demonstrate more transparency and accountability for how they operate, but they want performance metrics to be fair. Historically, payer quality measures have been incomplete because insurers are only using claims data.


To more effectively manage its data to demonstrate performance in an accountable care environment with the goal of improved outcomes and higher reimbursements, CCMCN adopted the enterprise master patient index software of VisionWare to create a single view of each patient, lower the maintenance costs of data management and referral hand-offs, enable data stewardship to be managed by non-technical staff, and improve validation and quality reports.

CCMCN considered many vendors before selecting VisionWare, with only a handful of them being able to provide an enterprise level solution. “VisionWare had the most robust toolset that allowed us to manage person matching on our own,” Greer recalls.

Also See: 4 key steps to success with master data management

Prior to implementing VisionWare, CCMCN had internal MPI systems that required persons with strong technical skills to manage them, but Greer wanted all staff to be empowered and more efficient, which the new software supports. “Our staff can log in and manage patient matching and program administration without having to know coding language. This has allowed us to free up our engineers for other work and leverage all of our employees in the most efficient and productive way.”

Most recently, CCMCN is focusing on using data to support public health priorities, identifying vulnerable persons such as pregnant women who are not getting regular checkups, or persons with addictions that are not being addressed. With every individual existing in multiple data sources, VisionWare is being used to identify the same person across many data sources.

“The bottom line is that we are using an enterprise-level information system to support the healthcare system and to protect vulnerable families," Greer says.

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