Nebraska Health Information Initiative Taps NextGate for Statewide Patient Matching and Trusted Data Exchange

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NextGate, the global leader in healthcare enterprise identification, announced that the Nebraska Health Information Initiative (NEHII), a leading health information exchange (HIE) connecting over 70 percent of providers in Nebraska, has selected its cloud-based Enterprise Master Patient Index (EMPI) to facilitate accurate patient matching and identification across the state.

The EMPI will integrate clinical information from 300 participating organizations to deliver a trusted network of unified health records for more than 4 million patients receiving care in Nebraska and the surrounding region.

As a strategic component for statewide outcomes improvements and coordination of care, the implementation will enable real-time interoperability and patient data matching for NEHII’s physician, hospital, health plan and pharmacy members. NEHII is the latest HIE organization to implement NextGate’s market-leading EMPI to overcome fragmented, highly diverse EHR applications and empower its network participants with a single best care record.

In the transition to value-based payment and care delivery models, the need for a complete and accurate view of individuals across the healthcare landscape becomes increasingly critical for greater clinical, operational and financial performance. Inaccurate patient identification costs the U.S. healthcare system $6 billion annually and results in medical errors, data quality issues, administrative waste, and poor patient and provider satisfaction.

Central to NEHII’s vision to be the population health utility for the state was to find a patient identity management partner that would eliminate silos of information and deliver a complete picture of a patient’s medical history.

“We are proud to be working with NextGate to ensure our members have meaningful data insights at the point of care to treat patients uniquely across the state,” said Jamie Bland, CEO of NEHII. “Effective care management and collaboration requires fluid data exchange and a holistic view of individuals to make better decisions, understand our populations and deliver the high-quality level of care every resident deserves. With NextGate, we are building a trusted and fully integrated information network that will positively influence the health and well-being of our communities.”

The EMPI will also enhance the state’s prescription drug monitoring program (PDMP), administered by NEHII, to improve patient data accuracy, reduce fraud, support interstate data sharing and match consumers to their medication records.

“HIEs are the lifeblood of state-wide connectivity and data-rich insights for various healthcare constituents across the continuum,” said Andy Aroditis, CEO of NextGate. “We commend NEHII for prioritizing patient identification as the basis for interoperability and are honored to support their population health strategy with a fully-integrated, automated solution that consistently and safely matches individuals to their health data.”

About Nebraska Health Information Initiative (NEHII)

NEHII, Inc is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization with a public/private governance model that includes health care providers, payers and the State of Nebraska. NEHII’s purpose is to achieve health care transformation through community betterment collaboration while protecting the security and privacy of medical information.

About NextGate

With over 200 customers in four countries, NextGate is the global leader in healthcare enterprise identification. Committed to helping organizations overcome the clinical, operational and financial challenges that result from duplicate records and disparate data, our full suite of identity matching solutions connects the entire healthcare ecosystem to drive critical improvements in quality, efficiency and safety. NextGate’s market-leading EMPI currently manages more than 300 million lives and is deployed by the nation’s most successful healthcare systems and health information exchanges.