OPENEMPI:

AN EXTENSIBLE, OPEN SOURCE

ENTERPRISE MASTER PATIENT INDEX

Odysseas Pentakalos, Ph.D.

CTO, SYSNET International, Inc.

odysseas@sysnetint.com

Why is an EMPI needed?

Patient visits multiple separate healthcare providers

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Enterprise MPI

Radiology

Patient known as

John Smythe

Hospital

Patient known as

John Smith

Laboratory

Patient known as

J. M. Smith

Patient

ID | John Smith |

Three entries merged into single record

Decomposing the Problem

Merging two patient demographic databases

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Cleaning and

Standardization Database A

Cleaning and

Standardization Database B

Blocking

Field

Comparison

Record Pair

Comparison

Matches Non-

Matches

Possible

Matches

Blocking Algorithms

Help make searching for matching records more efficient Comparing 2 sets of 100,000 records requires ~ 10 billion comparisons

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John Smith John Smith

No Blocking With Blocking

Field Comparison/Distance Algorithms

Phonetic Encoding Algorithms

Soundex: oldest and most well known algorithm

Phonex: aims soundex by pre-processing names

Phonix: extension of Phonex with > 100 rules

NYSIIS: New York State Identification Intelligence System

Metaphone/Double Metaphone

Approximate String Matching

Levenshtein or Edit Distance

Longest Common Substring (LCS)

Q-Grams

Jaro/Jaro-Winkler

Combinations of techniques

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Matching Algorithms

Variety of algorithms available, both deterministic and probabilistic

Fellegi-Sunter is the most popular probabilistic algorithm

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OpenEMPI Architecture

Utilizing the idea of a service, interchangeable

implementations of services can be plugged into the

system transparently

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Integration Interfaces

Native Java API (very comprehensive)

Spring based interface/Java interface

REST-ful Web Services Interface

Integrated into NwHIN Connect Gateway

IHE PIX/PDQ Interface

Tested at US IHE Connectathon 2009-2012

Participated in the HIMSS Showcase

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User Interface

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OpenEMPI now has a user-friendly web-based Administration

Console

The Community

OpenEMPI is open-source software

Software available and supported through www.openempi.org

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http://www.openempi.org/

Current and Future Work

Deploy OpenEMPI in production and pilot environments

Just completed a large deployment in Africa

OpenEMPI will support a population of 11 millions users

Extend the OpenEMPI Data Model

Entity-based model can operate as Provider Registry, Facility

Registry and more

Add support for more exotic Matching Algorithms

Investigating machine learning-based, supervised matching

algorithms

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Questions?

Thanks for listening!

Work on OpenEMPI was recently funded through a Phase I

& Phase II SBIR through

TATRC (Telemedicine & Advanced Technology Research

Center)

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