Duplicate medical records pose a significant threat to patient safety in healthcare. These multiple records for one patient can lead to errors in medication or treatment, misdiagnosis, or even security breaches. Healthcare organizations rely on accurate data to make critical decisions about patient care, treatment plans, and medical billing. Maintaining high data integrity ensures that healthcare providers have access to accurate and up-to-date information, which is essential for providing safe and effective care.
Understanding Duplicate Medical Records
Duplicate medical records occur when a single patient has more than one record in a healthcare provider’s medical record system. This can happen due to various reasons such as data entry errors, different spellings of patients’ names, or lack of a unique patient identifier. These duplicate records can lead to a host of problems, including misdiagnosis, inappropriate treatment, and medication errors.
The presence of duplicate medical records can severely impact patient safety and the quality of healthcare provided. Healthcare providers may rely on incorrect, incomplete, or outdated information to make crucial decisions about patient care.
MPI Cleanup – A Solution to Duplicate Records
Master Patient Index (MPI), or Enterprise Master Patient Index (eMPI) Cleanup / Remediation, plays a crucial role in resolving the issue of duplicate medical records. It involves the identification of duplicate medical records through the use of sophisticated algorithms and the subsequent resolution of the identified duplicate medical records, all the while increasing data integrity in healthcare organizations. The risk mitigation of having a sub-1% duplicate medical record rate can recognize both increased cash flow and revenue loss reduction.
MPI Cleanup not only helps in resolving duplicate medical records but also enhances the accuracy and reliability of patient data. It ensures that healthcare providers have the most up-to-date and complete information about a patient, which is critical for providing safe and effective care.
MPI Ongoing Management – Proactive Approach
MPI Ongoing Management refers to the continuous maintenance and updating of the electronic Master Patient Index. It ensures that the MPI provides an accurate, up-to-date view of a patient’s complete clinical history, including information outside of the electronic medical record like consumer data or social determinants of health (SDOH). This process is crucial in maintaining the accuracy and integrity of patient data in the healthcare system. When MPI is used in conjunction with Master Data Management (MDM), the accuracy of patient data matching improves significantly. This improvement in data accuracy is a major benefit of MPI Ongoing Management.
Defining a Proactive Enterprise-Wide eMPI Strategy [ Webinar]
This on-demand informative session will help you learn how to better define a proactive enterprise-wide eMPI strategy that helps to reduce duplicate creations and improve ongoing duplicate management.
The process of MPI Ongoing Management involves using referential matching and ensuring that every patient is represented only once with constant demographic identification within all systems of hospital data. This ongoing process helps to maximize operational efficiency and reduce errors, thus improving the overall quality of healthcare delivery.
Duplicate medical records are a pressing issue in healthcare. However, with effective MPI Strategies, healthcare organizations can significantly enhance their data integrity, improve patient safety, and ensure the provision of quality care.
For a free MPI cleanup consultation, reach out to our professionals today.
Meet Our Health Information Management Leader
Todd Goughnour, RHIA, MBA
Vice President of Health Information Management
Todd leads the success of the HIM division at e4health, bringing over 15 years of experience in the healthcare HIM and IT industry, and has been with e4health since its beginning. Complementing leadership with hands-on experience, Todd has led over 150 successful HIM engagements, with the majority of his focus on eMPI innovation in the industry. An active speaker and published contributor to the eMPI world, Todd has also served in multiple eMPI conversion program manager roles for our clients. Todd has also served in interim HIM director roles, and is the creator of e4health’s proprietary performance management software, e4sight. Todd holds an MBA from La Salle University and a Bachelor’s of Science in Health Information Management from Temple University.