Clean Up the Data 2025

What is Patient Matching and Deduplication?

• Patient Matching: This involves identifying and linking a patient's data across different healthcare systems and databases to create a comprehensive view of their medical history.?
• Patient Deduplication: This process removes redundant or duplicate patient records from a database, preventing fragmented information and ensuring that updates and queries apply to the correct record.?

Patient matching and deduplication processes rely on clean data. For example, full legal name and last name instead of nicknames or abbreviations.

Robert - legal name

Bob

Bobby

B. (hardest to match :(

Rob

Robby

Clean Data Starts in Patient Intake

Accuracy rates for patient matching and patient deduplication processes normally range from 40-80% (depends on the vendor and the data) but recently drops in the accuracy rates have been experienced, primarily due to the lack of standardized processes in patient intake.

An example standardization policy might include the below:

Digitize the Data

Without standardization of the intake process, digitizing of healthcare data, interoperability, and artificial intelligence will also struggle with accuracy and viable vendor products.

Kris Gates, connect@krisjgates.com