Why Patient Identity Is Healthcare’s New Infrastructure

It’s not for lack of data. Quite the opposite, in fact. Many organizations find themselves data rich and insights poor, as data is scattered across technology, providers, and partners.

In fact, this challenge of accurately identifying patients is 10x harder than it was just a decade ago, despite the rapid shifts organizations are taking to consolidate on one EHR vendor. Why? Because there are dozens of new applications that a patient’s data might be stored in that an organization needs to tie together and unify — and that data spans not only numerous clinical encounters, but also now marketing applications, and digital front doors, and online self-scheduling workflows, and call centers, and joint ventures, and telehealth vendors, and home health, and external labs, and PACS systems, and homegrown patient portals.

And it’s not just the number of applications that makes it so challenging — it’s the fact that patient data might be represented differently across each application. Working with dozens of healthcare providers, we see 30% of stored patient identifying data is out-of-date, incorrect, or incomplete, making it enormously challenging to identify the same patient across all of these touchpoints. Patients move and change their addresses, they get married and change their names, they fill out a webform and provide only their email address, they schedule an appointment through a call center that mistypes their birthdate.

Without solving this foundational problem of knowing who is who across every encounter and touchpoint, how are you supposed to provide that patient better care? How are you supposed to show them that you know them?

Organizations can know “who is who” by combining the most accurate identity resolution approaches with identity verification for heightened security, AI-powered data governance to automatically resolve data discrepancies, and identity-oriented analytics to gain better insights. Combine that with enrichment data to better understand a patient’s best data for outreach, their propensity for needing high-value service lines or their access to transportation, along with other demographics and psychographics, and you can extend what you know about patients so you can better engage them and care for them. Creating complete and trusted identity data across data silos means that high-fidelity data is available across the ecosystem so stakeholders can proceed with confidence.

Accurate identity is the driving force behind both better care and better experiences.

According to a 2024 report by the NCBI, medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the US. A 360-degree view of the patient means that health systems have the ability to deliver complete patient information at every point of care, decreasing the chances for medical errors and improving quality of care.

In addition to better care, accurate identity also is the foundation of better patient experiences. Today’s patients are empowered like never before, choosing how and where they receive care while expecting seamless, personalized experiences — just as they do in other industries like finance and hospitality. Having a complete view of the patient, including their contact preferences and consent, enables systems to improve patient experiences and build trust in care providers. More patient engagement leads to better adherence to care plans and fewer gaps in care, lowering the cost of care and improving outcomes.

At the most essential level, it prevents errors in patient care based on incomplete or mistaken identity and allows organizations to provide better care throughout their healthcare journey. Beyond patient care, accurate identity is a foundational element to strategic initiatives, such as growth, security, and joint ventures.

Growth: Providing exceptional patient experiences helps healthcare systems retain patients and build brand reputation. With healthcare margins continuing to diminish while competition increases, it is essential to retain existing patients while building a reputation for quality care in the communities the health systems serve.

Joint ventures: Health systems are moving more and more toward coopetition, where they are partnering with in-market competitors to create joint offerings. A strong identity solution enables systems to compare only selected attributes to compare patient populations and gain an accurate view of the joint market.

Security: CHIME recently issued an urgent alert to its members regarding a recent increase in impersonation attacks targeting hospital and health system help desks. Accurate identity integrated with identity verification reduces the risk of security incidents and helps to keep patient data secure.

First and foremost, AI is a driver for needing better data, and as a master data management platform that’s purpose built for healthcare, that means we’re focused on helping our customers get the most accurate, complete, and enriched data for each person delivered to the right workflow, or to the right analytics environment, at the right time. So, really, it’s about helping to enable our customers’ own AI strategies by providing them with the highest fidelity data to train their AI models on. For example, imagine a use case around having an AI agent help automatically schedule a patient. Well, how can you do that if you don’t have up-to-date provider location and specialty data, if you don’t know the patient’s proximity to different care facilities, if you don’t know that they need access to transportation, and if you don’t know the complete complex treatment history they’ve had that should inform what specialist they see next?

Second, we also recognize that as a master data management platform built for healthcare, there’s a huge opportunity to have AI embedded in our own platform to make end users’ lives easier. For example, that can mean making AI powered recommendations to understand the next best action you can take in our platform, in terms of managing the integrity and stewardship of your identity data. Or it can mean using AI to provide more transparency into the matching decisions being made in our platform, especially in the context of our patented approach to referential matching, which is already the most accurate identity resolution technology on the market.

The leaps forward will be gained by feeding clean identity data into AI tools. The combination of accurate and trusted identity data and a portfolio of AI tools will drive better analytics across enterprise while delivering improved patient engagement, enhanced decision making, and operational efficiency.