Patient ID tech helps remove duplicate patient identifiers

Clearing up confusion remains a sizable barrier in achieving ACO success, says John Supra.


The Care Coordination Institute, a consultancy in South Carolina, offers a number of services to providers looking to join accountable care organizations and succeed in the venture.

For example, the institute manages the population health management program of Palmetto Health. It also is working with more than 150 practices, using 70 types of electronic health record systems, that want to be in an ACO. In total, the institute is serving 1,700 providers in risk-based arrangements who serve 1.3 million patients.

In any ACO, 30 to 50 percent of patient are out of network, so patient identification is a sizable barrier, says John Supra vice president of solutions and services at the institute.

Homegrown patient identification technology was no longer sufficient to handle the growing volume of providers being served, and help came from NextGate, a vendor of next-generation patient management software. But it still took nearly eight months to clean up duplicate patient identifiers.

“Since the organizations are at risk, we need to know what services patients are getting out of network so we can match claims with patients using NextGate’s enterprise master patient index to understand who is out of network,” Supra says. All total, as many as 300,000 patient records were de-duplicated.

Last October, NextGate went live on a new cloud-based patient management system, which is more expandable and able to serve growing needs of the region’s providers.

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