An EMPI Can Integrate the Delivery System

Delivery systems are now the norm in the health care industry. With the incorporation of many entities into one organization, the functionality and maintenance of the master patient index (MPI) has been transformed into a more complex Enterprise MPI (EMPI), which allows a patient to be identified both longitudinally and across the continuum of care. The EMPI becomes the access point for linking patient information from multiple clinical and financial systems. The creation of patient-centric views of patient data, as opposed to facility-specific views now available, is a necessary step in integrating care across facilities. This is an important step in actually becoming an integrated delivery system (IDS).