Healthix Inc., the largest public health information exchange in the U.S., is adopting Verato Inc. as its primary vendor for patient matching in its transition toward a HITRUST-certified cloud infrastructure.

The New York-based HIE has chosen to make the referential matching technology of Verato’s Universal MPI solution its primary tool for matching patients accurately. In addition, the company is waiving its HIE connection cost, enabling independent physician practices to save thousands in integrating their EHRs and participating fully in the Statewide Health Information Network for New York.

“We are always looking to innovate and improve our technology stack, and our MPI is a foundational component of the technology foundation that supports Healthix services,” Todd Rogow, SVP and chief information officer at Healthix, said in a statement published by Verato. “We are well on our way to a full HITRUST-certified environment, and the Verato Universal MPI perfectly fits into our vision. It checks all the boxes: better performance, better security, better matching, and lower future cost.”

While conventional EHRs and EMPIs determine matches by comparing the demographic data of two patients, Verato employs referential matching, an approach that utilizes an algorithm to compare the demographic data of those patient records with the company’s reference database of identities, which contains information on more than 300 million people throughout the U.S.

The choice of Verato’s Universal MPI is expected to aid Healthix in avoiding future costs throughout its growth, as well as those for upgrades and ongoing annual support for hardware and software as it increases its service offerings. It also is projected to reduce the costs of manual data stewardship and manual matching processes.

The organization first came to rely on Verato as a vendor in 2016 with the implementation of its Auto-Steward solution, a simple cloud-based plug-in that automatically resolves difficult match decisions and can work with any existing EMPI or EHR.

The platform currently processes an approximate average of 40,000 match decisions daily for Healthix, while reducing the number of "potential duplicates" previously flagged or manually reviewed. With the implementation of its Universal MPI, the average approximate number of daily matches facilitated by Verato is slated to increase to one million per day.

Healthix will continue to work with its current primary vendor, IBM, and will maintain use of its solution, Initiate.

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