The Challenge

In the world of organ transplants, having the right information at hand can literally mean the difference between life and death. The ability to integrate data generated from disparate sources, augment it with transplant observations and view it as a whole is key.

In this case, a world-renowned medical and research center had no single system to view patient status and clinical information or extract useable data quickly. Doctors had to wait on IT report requests or spend time navigating through multiple sources of data, which hindered the decision-making process.

This medical center wanted to consolidate transplant data for better patient decision support and management, as well as for use in research and quality control. They wanted to interface their lab system with their Electronic Medical Record (EMR) and other systems that house transplant data into a consolidated application.

For help, this world-renowned transplant center turned to Life Sciences at MSA.

The Solution

Life Sciences installed an application that allowed our client to easily collect, access and organize critical patient data from all departments and resources. EDIT™ (Electronic Data Interface for Transplantation) is MSA’s innovative software management solution designed specifically for transplant programs.

EDIT allowed our client to bring patient and donor data into one platform. It was interfaced with several systems for automated population of labs, medications, demographics, and additional information.

We also employed EDIT’s ad hoc report builder to develop the reports and metrics that were instrumental in improving the center’s process. The center continuously uses numerous reports they have built with this tool to aid in their daily patient care.

In addition, our team provided workflow analysis and training to integrate the new platform into the daily transplant center process.

The Results

MSA’s solution allows our client to save valuable time, get a more comprehensive view of a patient’s history and medical status, evaluate situations, and deliver better care.

With EDIT, the transplant center can easily gather disparate data, pull reports for multiple uses, and maintain compliance. They also benefit from more robustly managed patients by use of EDIT’s alerting and task list features.

MSA’s solution also produced some surprising results, including a drop in the decline rate of donors, as well as a reduced wait time for candidates on the national transplant wait list, and an increase in the speed to listing for transplant candidates.

The Challenge

Here was a challenge for all kinds of companies in the health care industry: companies commoditizing their health care data assets, health care informatics companies, medical researchers, labs, drug companies, health insurance companies, and hospitals.

These entities generate and/or receive different types of patient data from different sources – data including prescription claims, doctor claims, hospital observations, lab results, Electronic Medical Records, and many other sources.

To get holistic patient views and provide value-added applications, these companies need to be able to align patient information across the multiple data sources.

At the same time, they need to create and maintain anonymous patient databases that are HIPAA compliant and cleared of patient Protected Healthcare Information (PHI). This requires a third-party to de-identify the data and assign a customer-specific universal patient identifier to each patient. The patient identifier must be irreversible but repeatable across multiple data sets. And the same patient identifier must be created for the same patient over time for those data sets.

Health care entities everywhere have found the perfect prescription for these problems within the Life Sciences division at MSA.

The Solution

Life Sciences at MSA comes to the rescue with our De-Identification Engine, Data@Factory™ products and HITRUST certified HIPAA environment.

The MSA De-Identification Engine

Employing the latest patient data encryption technology and proprietary algorithms, our HIPAA certified De-ID Engine creates a compliant, irreversible result. Our De-ID Engine creates patient tokens comprised of patient PHI and ancillary patient information. Our de-identification process also includes the cleansing of patient data to create a standardized data set for tokenization to increase the longitudinal alignment of the patients. In addition, multiple patient tokens can be created to facilitate multiple patient matching options and increase longitudinal patient matching alignment.

The MSA Data@Factory™

This solution uses the patient tokens and ancillary patient data to create and maintain an anonymous Patient Master Universe of Patients. The patient tokens and ancillary patient data are matched to the Patient Master data. The patient data is assigned a matching patient ID, or a new patient ID is created for new patients.

The patient medical data processing begins with the de-identification of patient data by the MSA De-Identification Engine, and then continues through the MSA Data@Factory for the assignment of a new or existing patient ID. The patient ID can then be added to the medical data to be sent to you for analysis. Additionally, the MSA Data@Factory offers a complete set of data manipulation capabilities that allow for the alignment of other data, including the generation of additional conformed dimensions.

The Data@Factory outputs are fully customizable for each client.

We also offer the option of deploying our De-Identification Engine within your environment, a third party’s environment, or at MSA.

HIPAA Hi-Trust certified environment

For the receipt and processing of PHI data, we offer a HIPAA HITRUST certified environment. Managed by our ITSS team in partnership with our Life Sciences division, the HIPAA environment is critical to the success of the MSA Data@Factory processing. This environment allows you to choose to send your PHI data directly to MSA for de-identification processing. All it requires is a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) between MSA and the data supplier.

The Results

Using our solutions, health care entities can align health care data from disparate data sets using anonymous patient IDs. They can also match and align other healthcare dimensions such as physician, claims, and payer matching.

A multi-layered encryption process in our De-ID Engine prevents possible Data Dictionary attacks by ensuring no one entity — data supplier, customer, or MSA Life Sciences — has all the encryption keys necessary to regenerate a set of patient tokens from a data set. For example, a set of census data cannot be run through the MSA De-Identification to generate a set of patient tokens for comparison against a set of customer specific tokens.

The result is a totally HIPAA compliant solution that allows you to get the information you need in a timely manner – even when it comes from different sources.