Exchanging information across the healthcare ecosystem and achieving interoperability is a goal and challenge all healthcare organizations share. Regulations such as the Affordable Care Act put forth incentives and requirements to drive adoption of electronic medical records and facilitate the exchange of information. While healthcare’s transition from paper to electronic medical records brings IT efficiencies and benefits to care coordination, it also presents new challenges and risks in managing and protecting digital patient identities. The complexity of managing patient identities increases as numerous systems with varying data quality are exchanging data; as does the complexity of protecting patient identities as the number of users and devices accessing sensitive patient information grows. The lack of a universal identifier, compounded by data integration challenges and fluid patient data, has significant consequences on patient safety, financial, operational and regulatory inefficiencies. The average hospital has around 800,000 records, of which 8%-12% are duplicates. With duplicates costing up to $50 per pair to reconcile, the result is millions of dollars in reconciliation expenses. Beyond reconciliation costs, duplicate and overlapping records also result in unnecessary tests and treatments, billing errors, identity fraud, and IT inefficiencies. Each of these has a direct impact on the bottom line and takeaway from the budget to improve the quality of care. Karly Rowe, Senior Director of Product Innovation, Identity Management is responsible for Experian Health’s Fraud and Identity solutions, which help healthcare organizations match, manage, and protect identities across the ecosystem. She is also responsible for finding new ways to leverage Experian’s data and analytics expertise to develop and deliver new, innovative solutions to the healthcare industry. Karly has spoken on identity management topics at numerous industry events and will be speaking at HIMSS 2017 in a View from the Top session.
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