What is the core of 4medica's work?
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4medica’s mission is to ensure providers and payers are working with and sharing high-quality health data. Low-quality data, such as duplicate patient records and missing or incorrect patient names and contact information, compromises the ability of clinicians and health plans to treat patients and effectively manage healthcare costs. Our healthcare data quality (HDQ) and patient matching technologies increase patient safety and enable better outcomes and greater efficiency – key objectives of value-based care – by avoiding repeat tests and other unnecessary resource utilization that wastes money and cause delays in approvals, implementation of care plans and billing/payment processes. |
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What are some current projects and/or innovative initiatives you are working on?
Our current focus is to leverage emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to ensure health data quality. Specifically, we use a unique four-layer Master Patient Index (MPI) process to simplify implementation of our HDQ platform. This process includes running patient records through our groundbreaking MPI, machine learning, referential matching and data enrichment and, finally, comprehensive data analysis. This four-layer process can reduce patient record duplication rates from more than 20% to as low as 1%. Our HDQ platform is being used for some innovative initiatives such as managing records for patients with long-term COVID. And New Jersey Health Information Network, a Health Information Exchange (HIE) with 71 hospitals, is using our platform to ensure exchange members are receiving admission, discharge and transfer (ADT) and other Continuity of Care Document (CCD) data for patients to enable coordinated care. As this organization has found, having better-quality data is good not just for clinicians, but for patient engagement because now these patients are able to access a lot of high-quality health data about themselves. That’s not always the case when hospitals, medical groups and HIEs lack quality data.
If you had to highlight a leader in your organization, who would it be and why?
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Oleg Bess, MD, Founder and CEO, 4medica Even as Dr. Bess has continued leading 4medica’s development of our HDQ platform and analytics capabilities, he has maintained an OB/GYN practice in Los Angeles and is recognized nationally as a gynecological and laparoscopic surgeon. Both in his practice and role as CEO of 4medica, Dr. Bess’s primary focus has always been on improving patient safety and health outcomes. |
How are you collaborating with other stakeholders?
We’re a strategic business and technology member of Civitas Networks for Health, working with that organization on the national exchange of data. In fact, we rolled out a shared services program with Civitas in March. Our goal with the program is to demonstrate why data quality at the exchange level is important and how what we’re ultimately dealing with isn’t data, but patients’ lives. And that’s why getting the data right is so vital. We also work with the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) to take patient matching technology and apply it on a national level. On a day-to-day basis, we collaborate with health information exchanges and health information works, labs and imaging centers, hospitals and integrated delivery networks, accountable care organizations and health plans. Most recently, we’ve begun discussing with two payers in Idaho about the possibility of enabling two-payer data exchange and member enrollment information. In all cases, our goal is to improve patient matching to increase patient safety, produce better outcomes and improve operational efficiency across healthcare.
What is the best way for someone to stay up-to-date with your work?
Our website, 4medica.com, is great place to get detailed information about our technology products and services and what they can do for customers and patients. The site also includes blog posts, in which we discuss relevant healthcare issues and projects we’re working on, as well as case studies and presentations. On a regular basis, you can keep up on what 4medica is doing by following our LinkedIn and Twitter accounts or signing up for our email newsletter.
