Verato(R) Announces Availability of its Universal MPI, a Groundbreaking, Cloud-Based, Nationwide Master Patient Index that Enterprises Can Simply "Plug Into"

MCLEAN, VA--(Marketwired - May 2, 2017) - Verato, Inc., a leading provider of cloud-based identity matching solutions, today announced the availability of the Verato Universal MPI, a revolutionary master patient index (MPI) that represents a groundbreaking approach to the problem of patient identity resolution. Unlike conventional MPI technologies that must be laboriously deployed and populated with patient data, the Verato Universal MPI is a pre-built, cloud-based, nationwide master patient index that enterprises can simply "plug into" -- without the need for extensive algorithm tuning, data standardization, data governance, data cleansing, or data stewardship processes.

The Verato Universal MPI is pre-populated with pre-mastered and continuously-updated demographic data spanning the entire U.S. population. It incorporates a powerful new matching technology called "referential matching" that leverages this pre-mastered database as an "answer key" to match and link identities that even world-class probabilistic algorithms can never match. Because of its greater accuracy and ease of implementation, it can support the rapidly emerging patient matching needs that conventional MPIs cannot.

"We built the Verato Universal MPI from the ground up to solve the patient matching problem in a completely new way," said Mark LaRow, CEO of Verato. "The current generation of MPI technology reached the limits of its probabilistic matching algorithms in the mid 2000s, leaving no room for new innovation. Our idea was to solve the patient identity problem by harnessing big-data and applying data science expertise at a level that would be inconceivable for any individual enterprise -- and then offer our solution to everyone."

The company created the Verato Universal MPI over four years, investing over 50,000 man-hours of data science and engineering efforts, spending millions of dollars to curate over a billion commercially-available demographic records sourced from three different industries, and inventing a totally new matching approach to harness its big-data technology. LaRow continued, "In essence, every subscriber to the Verato Universal MPI gets the country's most comprehensive and sophisticated MPI, at a fraction of the cost and effort it would take to deploy and populate a conventional MPI."

Existing MPI technologies are struggling today and will fail with new emerging requirements

Healthcare enterprises spend a million dollars or more each year to own and operate their MPIs. Even with the best technology and the best IT staffs, conventional MPI solutions are struggling -- they suffer unacceptably high duplicate rates and require teams of data stewards to manually resolve duplicate patient identities missed by their algorithms. All of this results in clinicians being unable to find medical records, redundant testing, impaired clinical care, and unclaimable revenue.

"We're entering an era where the number and diversity of new healthcare systems will explode with new population health analytics, patient portals, patient engagement applications, telemedicine, and personal health records," continued LaRow. "Each new system will add significant new burdens to the already struggling MPIs. To make matters worse, healthcare institutions are facing hospital mergers and massive EHR consolidations, as well as an increasing need to exchange patient information between institutions, payers, and regulators. All of this change will exceed the abilities of conventional MPI technologies, making them destined to fail. A new solution is needed, and that solution requires an entirely new approach."

The Verato Universal MPI was created to support emerging requirements that conventional MPIs cannot solve. The Verato Universal MPI is designed to:

• Support the rapid addition of new IT systems or applications simply by "plugging them in" using standard APIs -- with no additional tuning and no governance or data cleansing required.
• Turbocharge existing MPI technologies by automating their data stewardship, discovering duplicates they miss, and validating identities at registration.
• Support EHR consolidation since each independent EHR that is connected to the Universal MPI can reconcile its patients with the other.
• Support medical record exchange because every institution that is connected to the Universal MPI can resolve its patient identities with each other.
• Enable organizations to achieve the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT's (ONC) target duplicate rate of 0.5% rather than the current average duplicate rate of 8-12%.

The U.S. needs a consistent nationwide solution for patient identity

A critical weakness in U.S. healthcare today is the inability of healthcare organizations to coordinate patient care. The exchange of clinical information across organizations is currently very difficult, as conventional MPI technologies are unable to unambiguously identify common patients. Issuing a Universal Patient Identifier (UPI) to every person in the country is often proposed as a solution, but such an approach introduces immense logistical and privacy challenges. The Verato Universal MPI offers a much simpler alternative.

Because the Verato Universal MPI operates in a HIPAA and HITRUST certified cloud as a universally-accessible nationwide MPI, it can operate essentially as an identity resolution "utility" for healthcare -- not unlike the electric power utility. Just as every enterprise simply plugs into the electric power grid rather than operating an in-house electric generator, every healthcare enterprise can simply plug into the Verato Universal MPI to manage their patient identities rather than operating their own MPI.

Even more remarkably, because every organization that plugs into the Universal MPI indexes its private patient population to the same nationwide reference population, each participating organization has the ability to resolve common patients with other participating organizations. This offers a much simpler and more accurate flow of healthcare information between cooperating organizations.

"Today's announcement highlights an important step in tackling one of the most vexing issues in healthcare interoperability," said Aneesh Chopra, former CTO of the United States and President of NavHealth. "Even as EHRs begin to support patient access to their health information, most providers are reluctant to deploy the technology without greater confidence in the patient and record matching.

"Absent a policy change allowing national patient identifiers, I'm thrilled Verato is delivering a new solution for patient matching that provides high accuracy and complete consistency that every enterprise can leverage. Existing MPI technology, operating with different standards and different rules at every institution, can never provide the consistency or accuracy needed. The Verato Universal MPI is built to address the large-scale healthcare needs in the U.S."

About Verato

Verato offers a cloud-based matching platform that links and matches identities across disparate databases or organizations with the highest accuracy rates in the industry. Verato leverages an extensive self-learning database of U.S. identities as a reference, or universal "answer key." And because it is cloud-based, the Verato platform is less expensive, faster to implement, and more scalable than traditional matching technology. Verato is based in McLean, VA. For more information, visit www.verato.com.