Duplicate medical records and overlays pose a significant threat to the patients. Inaccurate patient matching can result in erroneous procedures and a significant danger to the patient. For instance, consider a patient record which has many duplicates, each of these duplicates will have some information or the other and will be missing some details too. The duplicate record may miss out on critical information such as the medical history of the patient, ongoing medications, blood type, allergies, or any other diagnostics. Imagine that a patient is treated on the basis of these incomplete or inaccurate details, serious complications are bound to occur, right?

These inaccurate records can cause unnecessary complications and inappropriate treatment and care that can cause more harm to the patient. The cost incurred by the facility for duplicate testing and making their Master Patient Indexes duplicate free is another story. Duplicate medical records can also have a negative impact on communications with the patient and result in problems during patient referrals. There are also cases of reimbursement losses, resource drains, security concerns, administrative inefficiencies, and a significant decrease in medical data integrity. These duplicate records significantly complicate and slow down the claims and billing processes. Monitoring and tracking initiatives are also affected as duplicate and overlay records tend to skew the data.

According to a survey carried out by Black Book, in which they interviewed around 1,392 healthcare technology managers, the average expense of repeated medical care because of duplicate records was $1,950 per patient per inpatient stay and over $800 per emergency department visit. The research further talks about the fact that 33% of all denied insurance claims result due to inaccurate patient identification or information costing the US healthcare system over $6 billion annually. Additionally, the clean-up period for facilities with over 150 beds and hundreds of thousands of records averages over 5 months, consisting of steps such as data validity, normalization, checking, and data cleansing. A 2018 survey by Imprivata and healthsytemCIO.com demonstrated that 17% of healthcare CIOs from a pool of 55 healthcare facilities reported an incident of patient harm at their facility due to duplicate patient records and around 40% reported privacy breaches. Another research carried out by Experian Health states that the cost incurred by an average hospital having around 800,000 records is estimated to be around $3.2M-$4.8M.

Duplicate medical records indeed pose a serious threat to the healthcare sector and there is an urgent need to remedy this issue. We recommend you to check out Duplicate Search & Merge for Salesforce. Offered by Mirketa, Duplicate Search & Merge is a pretty handy deduplication tool that can very effectively be used to manage duplicate data and incomplete records. It resolves all the data duplicity issues in a very easy configurable manner using out-of-box salesforce functionalities. Since it inherently runs natively on Salesforce, data does not leave the Salesforce org. This ensures complete data security as there is no data transfer at any point. You can also easily automate your deduplication processes through the smart scheduler and ensure that your data remains duplicate free!

Duplicate Search & Merge makes data cleansing very easy through its simple yet powerful 5-step approach! The user is guided seamlessly through each of these steps. You can easily select the object with duplicate data and set the desired filters by choosing the right fields. You then need to select the criteria to decide the master record (record to be retained) and search the duplicate records which are displayed. The last step of merging duplicates happens in the background and an email consisting of the links of the chosen master records is sent to the user. It is indeed pretty simple, isn’t it?