During this webinar hosted by Becker’s Hospital Review and sponsored by Verato, health system leaders discussed challenges around patient identity management and strategic approaches to addressing those challenges. Panelists were:
- Julian C. Ammons, director, IT digital cloud development operations, Baptist Health (Jacksonville, Fla.)
- Robert Bart, CMIO, UPMC (Pittsburgh)
- Lisa Griffin, VP, consumer experience and patient access, University Hospitals Clinical Network (Cleveland)
- Clay Ritchey, CEO, Verato
- Gurmeet Sran, chief clinical data science officer, CommonSpirit Health (Chicago)
Three takeaways:
1. Digital self-service and defragmentation are top digital transformation priorities. Enabling effective digital appointment scheduling can help organizations reduce dependency on call centers, but to work as intended, scheduling systems must be designed to benefit the consumer, not the clinician. They also must strike the right balance between being user-friendly and specialized enough to meet patients’ needs at the initial appointment. “There’s the cultural shift on who the schedule is for and then the balance of the specificity and sensitivity of the appointment template types,” Mr. Bart said.
Explaining University Hospital’s journey to zero strategy for providing a seamless experience — which is another digital priority for healthcare organizations — Ms. Griffin said: “We looked at the process of the visit, the business of the visit and the clinical part of the visit, so we know how to link things across the organization without working in a silo.” To facilitate this transition, Mr. Sran highlighted the importance of aligning the back-end technology. “The digital journey needs to be empowered one depth below by micro services architecture.”
2. Optimizing patient identity authentication is a core pending task. To accelerate digital transformation, organizations need a trustworthy 360-degree longitudinal view of patients’ medical histories, care journeys and multiple identities they may have across the health system. This is also important from a patient safety perspective as it helps avoid ordering potentially harmful duplicate tests or missing critical information such as allergies.
One way to achieve a holistic view is to combine automated identity authentication processes with human-led validation. “It ensures the system is not left to make a decision on data that is so sensitive that a letter being out of place could easily cause a daughter to get her mother’s results,” Mr. Ammons said. He said Baptist Health relies on “data stewards” to conduct such validation when the automated process produces a match below a certain level of certainty.
3. Precise patient identification impacts quality and equity metrics. Those metrics include patient experience, workforce efficiency and workforce satisfaction, but also health equity and patient outcomes. For example, trustworthy identification can improve outcomes for people of lower socioeconomic status by pinpointing risk factors that may prevent them from showing up for appointments, such as lacking reliable transportation.
To fulfill that goal, Mr. Ritchey said it is necessary to have mechanisms in place to enable identity interoperability across different systems, including those that lie outside healthcare. “You can’t just rely on your clinical systems; you actually have to have a place to coordinate the identity and the authentication of the individual,” Mr. Bart said.
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