Rio Grande Valley Health Information Exchange Deploys Verato Universal(TM) MPI

MCLEAN, VA--(Marketwired - May 31, 2017) - Verato, Inc., a leading provider of cloud-based patient matching and master patient index (MPI) solutions, today announced that Rio Grande Valley Health Information Exchange (RGV HIE), a trusted leader in secure patient-centric health information exchange in Texas, will leverage the Verato Universal™ MPI to better match and link patient records across its participating providers.

RGV HIE faces some of the toughest possible patient matching challenges. In total, it serves a patient population of over 1.6M people, including an Hispanic population, winter Texans, travel visitors, and patients travelling to providers outside of RGV HIE for more complex healthcare needs. RGV sought an MPI solution that could address these unique aspects of its patient population so it could continue to deliver the right patient records to the point of care.

Beyond the requirements for patient matching accuracy, RGV HIE also sought an MPI solution that could be rapidly deployed and that could be a core component of its best-of-breed technology strategy. Ultimately, it took just three months for RGV HIE to go live with the Verato Universal MPI -- including integration with RGV HIE's other technology solutions through the Verato Universal MPI's modern architecture and open APIs. 

"The speed of implementation, precision in patient matching, and ease of integration were all factors in selecting the Verato Universal MPI as our master patient index," said Genaro Garza, Director of IT, RGV HIE. "Verato has brought a next-generation technology to market that allows us to solve the matching challenges associated with our unique patient population. This will help us better achieve our mission of improving communication and patient care by providing a comprehensive system for the secure exchange of health information."

The Verato Universal MPI takes a totally new approach to solving the healthcare industry's complex and growing requirements around patient matching. Unlike conventional MPI technologies that must be laboriously deployed, configured, and populated with patient data, the Verato Universal MPI is a pre-built, nationwide, cloud-based master patient index that organizations can simply "plug into" -- without the need for extensive algorithm tuning, data standardization, data governance, data cleansing, or data stewardship processes.

To achieve such a high degree of matching precision, the Verato Universal MPI is pre-populated with pre-mastered and continuously-updated demographic data spanning the entire U.S. population, and it incorporates a powerful new matching technology called 'referential matching' that leverages this pre-mastered database as an answer key to match and link patient identities that even the best probabilistic algorithms in conventional MPIs can never match.

"The healthcare industry is entering a period where achieving 'identity interoperability' will drive every healthcare organization's technology strategy," said Mark LaRow, CEO of Verato. "Organizations can no longer rely on a centralized patient database to consolidate and sort patient identities -- because this database has to be re-tuned, re-configured, and re-governed with each additional IT system it connects. This is prohibitively expensive for organizations in terms of time, effort, and cost, and will ultimately lead to the death of conventional MPI technologies as we know them. The Verato Universal MPI, on the other hand, is built to solve tomorrow's challenges around identity interoperability. Any IT system can easily plug into it, and each IT system that is connected to it can unambiguously refer to patients by referencing the same universal set of identities."

About RGV HIE
The Rio Grande Valley Health Information Exchange (RGV HIE) is a non-profit organization dedicated to facilitating the secure exchange of patient health information to improve communication and patient care in South Texas. The RGV HIE brings a regional-level infrastructure solution that connects information between participating health care organizations and providers by integrating disparate systems and enabling the exchange and use of critical patient information for making care related decisions at the point of care in an encrypted format. From Brownsville to Laredo, we work with physicians, hospitals, and other healthcare organizations to ensure that critical health information is communicated in a consistent and secure manner.

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.