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“I’m Michael Parris. I’m the VP for Texas Health in data and analytics. What that means is I have our data warehouse team, our business intelligence group, our data science team, a general analytics team, and our process improvement team. So Texas Health is a company that has around 23,000 employees. We have 27 hospitals, about 4000+ beds, and we serve around 7 million+ people across 16 counties. We are a faith based organization, that’s a nonprofit. So at Texas Health, we were really wanting to build a 360 degree view of a person. And what that really entails is putting together their clinical data, their call center data, their virtual appointments data, their claims data, their outside data, such as Experian or IXI, and really put in that as well as our joint ventures and really putting that all into one version of a person. And what makes it difficult in health care is we see people over time, so we’re with you your whole life. And during even just a three year period, people change addresses, they’ll change phone numbers. They’re also changed their last name. And piecing together somebody who’s at one of our joint ventures or through experience data with our epic data is a difficult task because if you change, we only have the person in our experience and the person to be an epic. And if the addresses don’t match, it’s hard to put together.
We have a probabilistic matching algorithm that comes out of a box with certain ones of our tools, and we actually use Verato because we like the idea that it has not just you, but your last five addresses, your last names, and it pulls people together in a better standpoint. We’ve sold better luck out of that. The reason why we really want to pull together everybody into that 360, we want to understand people’s journey over time and where they’re going. So if they need orthopedic surgery or one of those things, we’re able to actually see all the steps and processes that they went up to and then figure out where we can actually improve that future. The other piece that when it comes down to that probabilistic matching versus the referential matching side is we actually did put it on top of our epic identity product and it currently kicks out around 1500 names every week. As far as these aren’t people that it’s more it’s not certain about matching.
We’re able to put that auto store product on top of that and it wipes out around 50% of those consistently every week where each one of those took around 15 minutes for somebody to work through, basically eliminate that entire 15 minutes time. And if you do 750 of those a week, that adds up pretty quickly. The other piece that we’re really trying to pull together is getting that identity fairly, really clean. So understanding what that golden record is for a person with their identity and if we have to. And they’re not matching up, that really creates a major problem because we don’t want to have multiple versions of the same thing in which we’re marketing to multiple people. And it’s really actually one, nothing kind of annoys you more in the mail Than when you see two or three things with your name on it address to yourself. And this actually eliminates a lot of that issue.”
Michael Parris, SVP Enterprise Data and Analytics, Texas Health
“Hi, I’m Keley Aarnes. I am Assistant Vice President of Business Operations here at Northwell Health. We are a 24-bed hospital system in New York and over 800 physician practices. My responsibilities at Northwell include our enterprise master patient Index, along with our patient identity strategy.
We currently use Verato’s out of Stuart and we have been partnering with Verato for the last two years. We were originally introduced to their solution about three years ago and we were looking for a better way to manage our disparate data sources and applications. We largely grew out of mergers and acquisitions and have multiple source data, and we were challenged with stewarding our identities across these systems. And so we began using our steward as a solution to leverage referential data on top of the algorithms that we had internally so that we could better determine if different records were of the same person or different sources. And we send this information to Verato daily. They send what we call back the answer key, and we use that to make a very informed and accurate decision. If potential dupes are the same source or entirely different patients.
We also use Verato’s out of Stuart to do roster comparisons. So again, speaking about mergers and acquisitions, we use them to do the analysis out front before we ingest any patient information or backloads into our system as opposed to just bringing in all that data and then later having to clean it up and really the big piece of this and being the under pending of what we do and our additional front door strategy, which is really been a major initiative across our healthcare entity, really trying to drive and create a new and special experience for Northwell patients and being that we’re in New York, we’re in a very highly competitive market, as you can imagine, and we wanted to go beyond what was offered from the HR portals, which we currently also do have in production today. And that was our vendor portal. That is really the table stakes. And when you think about portals, an ability to manage appointments, pharmacy refills, clinical discharge summaries, radiology, and laboratory results. But we wanted to go beyond that and we couldn’t find anything in the market at the time and anything off the shelf.
So we decided to take this kind of new radical direction in creating our own digital front door for Northwell, a white-label experience that we could create this emotional connection that would differentiate us from our competitors in the market and to create and bring together data elements that we really had never used in healthcare like empathetic data element to begin to create this in an application and the stickiness and personal connection and move beyond that transactional experience that we have where it is our scheduling over the appointment, it’s our clinical interaction, and then it’s our experience of billing and it ends until the patient needs us again. But really creating that meaningful experience to bring the patient back to their portal and to interact with us at Northwell. And again, moving beyond accessing medical records.
But over time, we really are beginning to now layer upon CRMs and other insights that we gather, even if it’s from a one-on-one experience with our patient, and then be able to surface that data back in a meaningful workflow at the time that it’s needed. And then that will actually create this, again, this emotional connection to our patients, which we were not able to find in the market.”
Keley Aarnes, Assistant Vice President of Business Operations, Northwell Health
“My name is Geremy Gersh. I’m the Vice President of I.T. for Gripa and Cognizant. Gripa is responsible for caring case management for around 300,000 attributed lives in the local Rochester, New York area. I joined Gripa around 18 months ago and is any person joining a new company the first 90 days they say you evaluate everything, the people, the process, the technology, and then really focused in on these EMPI people because they’re all of our members and patients are most important to Gripa.
So I wanted to make sure we were doing that with great cause and understanding of who these people were. So after evaluating our current vendor, we looked at the cost. We looked at the output and the results we were getting. The number of tasks that we had to work on every month and made the decision that there’s got to be a better way to do this. The challenge, after being with our vendor for over ten years is changing.
If you’re comfortable with that company, you’re comfortable with the results, and you’re comfortable knowing that every month as we interact with members, that information stays the same. So as we reached out to Verato, they suggested we do a proof of concept. And I think it was a Thursday. We provided hundreds of thousands of records and by Monday we had those results. That allowed me to gain the confidence in Verato. It allowed my peers and the rest of the I.T. team to gain confidence in the tool and the technology to make sure that this is the right decision. And then we proceeded to replace our previous EMPI vendor, Netscape, with the Verato tool. When considering any shift from one vendor to another, one of the most important things is cost, right? And it’s not just a cost for that service, but it’s all the soft and ancillary costs that surround it as well. A good example of this is we had an employee who was spending most of her time every month reviewing manual tasks to ensure that the match was correct. The average monthly list was around 4000.
As we moved to Verato, that number dropped to around 40 90% of her job. We are now able to leverage her in a different way. She’s happy. We’re happy. That’s just one example of a long-term cost savings that we weren’t anticipating, which is also a great thing. The other piece is we were spending a lot of time on releases and testing and validation and making sure that the tool is the upgraded solution, met our needs, and met the quality standards we had set upon with Verato. All that is happening on the cloud and there are upgrades and updates happening and the only know, only reason we know about it is our metrics getting better and better, right?
There hasn’t been that cost or burden. I have to go through all the energy and effort of releases and then also tell our customers they can’t get their data for a day or two or whatever it is until we not only deal with that release but also validate all the data. That takes a little bit of time. We’re not doing any of that along with the cost itself being cheaper and there’s no nickel and diming. Their solution is one price, and that’s the price we pay. And there hasn’t been in the last 14 months. One question or concern about anything. The best part of this whole process was after we went live, after implementation, and when we started seeing the results of our 1.5 million records and saw a 6% match rate improvement. So for the 60,000 members, really our 30,000 members think of how much care and how better and more accurate we have been by doing this implementation. The other piece, the implementation that was really eye-opening was the speed at which we did this. You know, when you do an on-prem solution, you’re talking 12 to 18 months to implement something like this. We did ours in 53 calendar days. I know that’s not the norm.
Our previous vendor, when we informed them that we were thinking of departing and going somewhere else and gave us a hard deadline of the contract end and there wasn’t an ability to extend even for a quarter. It put my group, put Verato, and more importantly, it put the patients and physicians in a very awkward position. And Verato came to the table along with us and said, we can do this. And 53 days later, we were up and running and have never looked back since.”