The key to longitudinal patient journeys

A data-rich longitudinal patient journey is key to research and development, commercialization and marketing in the world of life sciences and pharmaceuticals. But how does a comprehensive patient journey come to fruition? At its core is high-quality de-identified patient data, matched across myriad data sources in a HIPAA-compliant, privacy-protecting manner.

The traditional patient journey is comprised of many stops along the way: from a patient developing symptoms to seeking treatment, visiting a doctor or a hospital, picking up medication from the pharmacy, following up with a healthcare provider and more. All of these data points sit in different locations including electronic medical records (EMR), hospital “chargemaster” data, pharmacy claims, lab tests, payer claims and more. This wide scattering creates a fragmented picture of the patient due to a lack of interoperability amongst the data itself.

This data (known as PII - personally identifiable information) must be secure by US HIPAA standards, portable, de-identified and linked to build a truly accurate, longitudinal patient journey that nets insights into variances such as patient adherence, drug efficacy, and medical outcomes over time.

Challenges of patient data de-identification

There are three high-level, intertwined issues with handling PII, the building blocks of a patient journey:

Data privacy and security—Private information is vulnerable to breach. De-identification or anonymization ensures that data is only associated with PII when it is actually required and permitted.

Data interoperability—When data is used across systems or enterprises, it must be rendered interoperable (that is, able to be read accurately by different systems), without loss of privacy protections.

Data matching—When third parties or decoupled enterprise systems are involved, a single patient may be assigned multiple identity tokens by different healthcare providers. As PII transverses different systems, there must be a way to reconcile these differences, avoiding a fragmented client record while reducing false negative or positive matching.

Transforming PII: HealthVerity’s solution to building an accurate, high-value longitudinal patient journey

HealthVerity solutions bring data to life in a way that’s fully privacy-shielding (HIPAA-compliant), and interoperable. PII is managed by HealthVerity Census, the industry-leading real-time matching and identity resolution technology, which transforms protected health information into universal, de-identified HealthVerity IDs (HVIDs).

HVID empowers our clients to accurately build and share the patient journey across partner datasets while creating a single source of truth for patient identity. The HVID is unique, unlike other industry token mechanisms that rely on matching identically or in a deterministic manner.

If a patient’s identity is created with slight variations, such as misspellings, abbreviations, or even new addresses, deterministic matching solutions can overlook accurate matches or make false ones, resulting in fractured data.

Instead, HealthVerity uses a probabilistic matching solution that takes these variants into consideration, resulting in far fewer false negative matches (3.2%) and false positive matches (0.2%) than other solutions available today. Applied to our clients’ proprietary data, HealthVerity solutions work across internal departments or divisions; even siloed datasets that have been mutually inaccessible up until now can be brought together in a useful manner, regardless of source.

The final output is an accurate, interoperable, de-identified patient record that allows HealthVerity clients to exchange data securely with external partners, create an accurate enterprise-wide patient master and abide by expanding privacy and governance regulations.


One step further: Leverage partner data sources like
never before

Along with allowing clients to benefit from the data they already own as never before, the HealthVerity ID allows real-time linkage to HealthVerity Marketplace, the largest healthcare data ecosystem comprised of medical and pharmacy claims, lab tests and results, hospital chargemaster data, electronic medical records (EMR), and more from over 75 major data providers. Data within the HealthVerity ecosystem spans 10 years retrospectively, allowing for long lookbacks, enabling more complex assessments and conclusions about the patient healthcare journey.


Pulling it all together: An accurate, longitudinal, de-identified patient journey

By solving for PII, establishing accurate matches, ensuring proprietary data is interoperable and even appending enterprise data with HealthVerity Marketplace data, our solution makes it possible for clients to build a truly accurate, longitudinal patient journey that is comprehensive and insightful.

For answers to your questions about HealthVerity technologies, contact us at marketing@healthverity.com.