The Baylor project, started about a year and a half ago, is aimed at creating an enterprise view of data for patients treated at its 12 hospitals, said Scott Schoenvogel, assistant vice president of the revenue cycle at the Dallas-based health care firm.
Baylor Health expects that the system will eventually be used as the foundation of a patient's comprehensive electronic medical record.
In the first phase of the project, Baylor opted to use the Identity Hub data integration software from Initiate Systems Inc. to link registration data from each of the hospitals in its network, Schoenvogel said. Thus, a patient entering any of the facilities has to go through the lengthy registration process only once, he noted.
"It really lets us carry certain core information about a patient from one place in the health care system to the next," Schoenvogel said. The long-term goal is to link data from multiple source systems - not just the registration system - in the health care network, he added.
With the first phase of the project complete, patient information is funneled through the new software, which scours existing registration data to see if the health system already has a file for that person.
Later this year, Baylor plans to launch the next phase of the project, which will involve checking for a patient identifier match in real time during the registration process, Schoenvogel said.
The key goal of the project is to solve one of the most vexing problems facing health care organizations looking to share patient data internally or with other entities: ensuring that data in e-health records is matched to the correct patient.
"We have to be able to link literally hundreds of different data repositories together to create that continuous record," Schoenvogel said. "We need to be sure that the information we have produces a match to another record."
So far, the project has not been without its challenges - including coming to terms with the fact that no system, including this one, can guarantee that the correct patient records will be accessed every time, Schoenvogel said.
Instead, the software provides a probability that certain records should be associated with a patient. As part of the first phase, the organization had to establish an acceptable probability level associated with different processes and put in place manual review processes for when that level is not met, he added.
Moreover, Baylor Health took two months to build new interfaces and set up the data formatting with existing registration systems at each hospital, he said.
Forrester Research Inc. analyst Eric Brown said that Baylor Health is among a handful of early users of integration tools to index patient records. "What Baylor is trying to do is central to a transformation in health care overall," he said. "The thrust in health care right now is to create the 360-degree view of the patient."
But just as commercial companies have gone through the pain of trying to link customer and supply chain data, organizations implementing this type of project face myriad challenges, he added.
For example, the health care industry is made up of a variety of entities running a wide range of systems and using many different means of identifying patients, Brown said.
"Unlike screwing up a direct mail campaign or a manufacturing order," he noted, "combining two people's medical records has potentially life-threatening implications."