Death by medical error or accident is the nation’s leading cause of accidental death, exceeding all other types of accidental death combined.
In a country with some of the most advanced medical technology on earth, one might wonder how this happens. Duplicate and entangled medical records are a major contributing factor to this tragic phenomenon. While the financial costs can be exorbitant, they pale in comparison to the hazards posed to human health.
Proper deduplication greases the wheels of every medical record system. It either works silently in the background, or jams up the whole system. Deduplication can be handled either as part of the data mastering process, or as standalone match and merge actions.
In many healthcare systems, data mastering and deduplication are part of the same process.
The process of mastering your data can illuminate duplicate records, and these duplicate records are then cataloged under a single master record. This is especially true for systems that bring in data representing similar information, but from many different sources.
For example, take a Health Information Exchange (HIE) that operates on a hub-and-spoke model. Different health records for the same patient could come in from multiple sources (different specialists, for example), and must be cataloged under a single master record. That master record would encompass information from each of those disparate medical records that represent the same patient.
However, it’s important not to assume all systems use data the same way. What about a system that operates off singular medical records.
Take a single hospital or standalone clinic. Systems like that don’t use data mastering in the traditional way, because a singular record is used to track everything for a patient. Everything from which drugs are prescribed to allergies to provider notes are tied to a single record representing a single patient. If additional information comes in for that patient from outside the system, then that information is added or attached to that singular record. It is never considered a separate record.
Since a single record of information is used to track each individual patient, there is no need for traditional mastering, since there should never be separate records that need to be mastered together. However, anytime humans are involved, errors can happen and that single patient may accidently have more than one record created.
Duplicate medical records happen when a single patient is represented by multiple records within a singular healthcare system. This means a patient’s prescriptions, allergies, and physician notes, etc, may be spread across disparate records and the care team working off one of those records may be unaware of crucial information on another record. Not only does it hurt efficiency and delay insurance reimbursement, but it puts patient lives at risk.
In this situation, it’s crucial to identify duplicates and accurately merge them along with the medical information they entail. These records aren’t necessarily mastered together under a single golden record representing multiple instance records, rather the two instance records themselves are merged together into a single record.
Every health care entity uses data differently, and custom solutions are often needed. Schedule a call, tell us your data problems, and hear our solutions
