Rush Health utilizes location data to support patients and quality care providers

Challenges 

• Implement an easy to integrate Geo-Location service that could support RushHealth’s member hospitals.
• Eliminate inaccurate, outdated, or duplicate patient profiles in their EMR system to improve the patient matching and referral process.
• Make enhanced recommendations of care to patients based on their current address and their proximity to providers or specialists.
• Improve the timeliness and quality of referral communication as well as strengthen patients’ referral experiences.

Results

• Improved value-based service by enriching the view of patient address data and enabling more accurate patient matching.
• Leveraged address intelligence and geocode data to find relevant service providers based on patient and provider locations.
• Employed Verify, Loqate’s back-end address verification solution, to authenticate & standardize address data, ensuring that only standardized and complete contact information exists in their Epic database.

Value-based care & coordination

For Rush Health, providing value-based care to patients and providers is always at the forefront.

One of the requirements for their success lay in the successful management of the referral process. As a first step toward achieving this goal, Rush built the process into their electronic medical record (EMR), effectively integrating referral management into physicians’ existing workflows. However, while the system created a space for more physician interaction and governance, referral patterns showed that they were still experiencing friction in both the patient and provider experience. 

Rush experienced difficulties linking patients to the right providers due to inconsistencies in their EMR caused by incomplete, outdated, or duplicate patient address data. To resolve these concerns and enhance patient matching, Rush Health implemented Loqate’s Address Verification (AV) solution.

Rush Health was looking for a simple Geo-Location service that we could wrap around an internal API to provide to our member hospitals, mainly Rush University Medical Center.

-Collin E. Sasser, Interim Director / Web Manager

Accurate address data at the heart of patient care

Seamless access to patient data can improve equity and consistency in service, expand a referrer’s visibility, and results in improved waiting times for specialist outpatients.

Rush uses its Epic EMR system to collect and store patient data as well as communicate patient information at the time of referral. But dissatisfaction with their current referral process became widespread among both primary care physicians (PCPs) and patients. 

“Currently, our EMR is subpar when it comes to making recommendations of care to patients; the closet providers may not be the ones used for referrals,” says Collin. Convenience and communication, powered by comprehensive EMR data, are crucial to physician referrals, but only if the system’s data is verified and maintained. Rush Health recognized that, while patients and physicians were able to access and share medical records, actions such as searching specialist locations were challenging without the ability to verify patient addresses and recommend Rush Health providers based on their proximity.

Rush used Loqate’s address verification solution to help validate and enrich patient address data in their EMR, ensuring that addresses entered into the systems are accurate and appending latitude and longitude coordinates to any address location for pinpoint precision.

Epic batch runs all the patients and provider addresses through the Loqate’s Verify API and stores the GeocodePoint Points. This allows the referral system to reference the appropriate information when making referrals to our patients.

Collin E. Sasser, Interim Director / Web Manager

Improving referral communication with geocodes

The seamless integration of Loqate’s Geocode API into Rush’s EMR system has equipped providers with a secure portal where they can seamlessly and accurately match and share patient information.

“Patient addresses in the EMR are routinely validated and updated with any new changes,” says Collin. Once address data is processed in batch and run through the Verify API, it returns to the Epic database verified, enriched, and standardized. Zip codes are turned into tangible longitude and latitude coordinates that can be used to calculate exact distances and increase location data reliability. Thereby creating and maintaining the most accurate and complete patient address data and providing the data needed to optimize the referral process.

Through real-time geocoding, there are more opportunities to save time, cater to patient and provider needs, and easing travel for patients who may be limited by physical or financial factors. “Our customers should now be able to find the appropriate care closer to home than before. This should increase our customer’s satisfaction while reducing travel costs and time,” says Collin.

By appending geo-coordinates to patient address data, Rush can successfully minimize the chances that recommended providers will be out of the coverage area and eliminate the need for patients to manually search for closer doctors.

Using Loqate, we have been able to match patients with the appropriate providers in a very streamlined and beneficial process, therefore adding value to the lives we are responsible for.

- Collin E. Sasser, Interim Director / Web Manager