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Not long ago, Excel spreadsheets were cutting-edge technology. Compared to stacks of paper and rows of filing cabinets, they seemed like an efficient, cost-effective way to organize and access data. But times have changed. Now, healthcare leaders are looking at their sea of spreadsheets wanting a simpler solution. According to KaufmanHall's "2018 CFO Outlook" report, 94 percent of the senior financial officers surveyed said that their healthcare organizations supplement their main data systems with spreadsheets. In the same report, more than half of them noted the need for better data visualization and easier report creation. This scenario could not be truer for Cody Torgler, physician revenue integrity coordinator with the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. He realized that using spreadsheets was a waste of time and resources. "It really took our follow-up staff away from what they do well," Torgler said. "It was causing them to touch claims multiple times. Every time you touch a claim [that needs more attention], that's taking money away from a claim that you might be able to get reconciled." How did Torgler's team solve its spreadsheet struggles? They saved time, money, and headaches by implementing a contract management system that monitors payer compliance with contract terms, value claims, and audit remittances based on the latest payment rules and adjudication logic. The hospital's new system provides regular updates to staff on claims and offers visualization and more easily searchable data. Staff members can navigate their database by grouping attributes, filtering, or generating reports. "The sky's really the limit with being able to find these variances, get these variances to the payer, and get them reconciled on time," Torgler said. The University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics realized something other providers are coming around to as well: With better systems available, it's time to say sayonara to spreadsheets. Shake off spreadsheets and experience Experian For healthcare organizations that are ready to move past spredsheets, Experian Health offers a series of seamless data management solutions: 1. Claim Scrubber Spreadsheets get messy quickly. They're often maintained by multiple users, with different people entering data according to their own preferences. A less than immaculate spreadsheet might not seem like a big deal — until it comes time to fill out claims forms. That's when problems tend to snowball. Incomplete or inaccurate claims forms lead to undercharges and denials, wasting your team's time and effort. Experian Health's Claim Scrubber ensures every claim is clean. Even better, it's automated. Instead of wading through piles of spreadsheets, your staff can spend more time helping your healthcare customer. 2. Contract Manager and Contract Analysis Excel works in a pinch for records storage, but it's not great at keeping track of all the details of a patient's contract. Small fields with overflowing text can leave out important information and make it tougher for providers to see opportunities for negotiation. Experian Health's Contract Manager and Contract Analysis is like an automated contract lawyer. It helps healthcare organizations validate the accuracy of reimbursements, recover underpayments, negotiate better payment terms, and even evaluate potential lines of business. The bottom line? These tools leverage the best data to provide peak contract performance. Torgler's team at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics uses the Contract Manager to stay on top of the hectic process of claims verification. "With the claim count that we have at the university and the volume that we have, Contract Manager has made the transition from the Excel documents to check expected amounts seamless," Torgler said. "The success of Contract Manager has allowed us to really grow at the university." 3. Patient Estimates Whether they're in for an annual checkup or open-heart surgery, patients like to know how much they're going to pay. But poor estimates are frustrating for everyone involved, and estimates based on a few rows of spreadsheet data are bound to be inaccurate. Only when patients are armed with the right estimates can they make informed decisions about what services they can afford. To provide accurate estimates, Experian Health's Patient Estimates tool relies on robust and continuously updated data. A spreadsheet might be able to hold information about a patient's claims history, contract terms, and insurance benefits, but why bother? Experian Health's tool gathers all that data automatically to issue top-notch estimates without unnecessary hassle. 4. Payer Alerts Once you close Excel, the information on a spreadsheet can't help you; it just sits there. Wouldn't it be nice to receive notifications whenever an insurance provider's payment policies or procedures change? That's why Experian Health's Payer Alerts keeps you current with an enormous range of payers. Information from more than 50,000 webpages run by more than 725 payers continuously feeds into the system, which then issues updates and distributes them via email and an online portal. With Payer Alerts, your organization will never be left out of the loop. The healthcare landscape is complicated and constantly changing. Spreadsheets just can't keep up any longer. Experian Health's data-driven solutions can ensure your organization doesn't get left behind. Schedule a demo with Experian Health today.

Experian Health will be at HFMA ANI again this year–booth 1025–at the Venetian-Palazzo Sands Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada. Kristen Simmons, Senior Vice President, Strategy, Innovation, Consumer Experience, and Marketing, with Experian Health, chatted with Joe Lavelle of IntrepidNOW to provide her insights on this year’s HFMA ANI conference, consumerism in healthcare and much more! Excerpt below: Experian Health booth activities  "[In our booth this year at HFMA ANI, we want to focus] around peer to peer learning and exchanges, so we are doing less selling and more engaging and more understanding. Understanding folks problems and helping to collectively arrive at solutions. We are doing a lot this year in terms of hands on demos of our solutions. We'll be showing some of our patient engagement products which include, self-service portals and mobile options for getting price estimates for applying for charity care, and setting up payment plans. Likewise, on the revenue cycle management side to automate orders with patient access functionality, contract management claims and collections, all those types of things that we do to improve efficiency and increase reimbursement for our clients. We'll also be showing off some of our identity management capabilities to match, manage, and protect patient identities so we can safe guard medical information and reduce risks for our clients. And on the care management side, our early support and sharing of post acute patient care information to help providers succeed as we all move forward into a value based paradigm." How Experian Health is addressing the need for consumerism in healthcare  "When it comes to consumerism, it's interesting when you're a company that has a lot of data and a lot of capabilities to say, 'Hey what can we do for people?' One of the things we really wanted to look at for our consumer approach, was to say, 'What is it that needs to be done?' We had some great hypotheses coming in and a lot of those were borne out but we actually undertook a big national study to take a look at what consumers biggest pain points were. It has a qualitative and a quantitative component. But, we basically looked at the entire healthcare journey so we weren't just asking them about the administrative and financial aspects of care, but also the clinical aspects. As we walked through the journey and were able to get a lot of quantitative data about all these different aspects of their healthcare journey, what actually turned out to be the most painful for the most people, were all the things around the financial equation. And, so clearly there can be pain in a clinical side, especially if you're unhealthy, you've got something chronic, you've got something terminal. There's all kinds of awful situations there but, really affecting almost everyone is a lot of the pain around the financial aspect of healthcare. So, we were able to look closely at some of those pain points and decide on some of the biggest ones that we wanted to tackle." How Experian Health is helping providers address financial pain points for patients and providers "Some of the big pain points for people is just the fact that you don't know what you're going to owe and as the patient portion of responsibility increases, understanding what you're going to be paying becomes more and more important to a consumer. So, understanding what I owe earlier, being transparent, and then helping me pay, those are some of the areas. And there are others but those are some of the absolute biggest pain points. And as you pointed out with some of our propensity to pay analytics, and some of the other capabilities that we have, we're able to help providers understand the financial situation patients are in much earlier in the process so they can get them to the right kind of funding sources. They can give them peace of mind so that they know what they're paying upfront, which may impact when they choose to go in for a major procedure or how they might want to save up for it or how they might want to access different funding sources." Listen to the full podcast

There's no question that portals increase patient engagement. According to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, almost eight in 10 patients appreciate the improved access to healthcare information afforded to them by self-service systems. Unfortunately, portal systems also offer an obvious target for healthcare hackers. Within a patient portal, criminals can steal medical identity data, which is worth somewhere between 20 and 50 times as much as financial data, such as credit card numbers. They then use the stolen information to submit fraudulent claims, fill prescriptions, and resell medical equipment. What's more, because many healthcare organizations lack proper detection tools and some patients neglect to check their explanation of benefits (EOB) statements, health data breaches tend to go undetected longer than those in other sectors. No wonder healthcare data security incidents rose 211 percent in 2017, according to the 2018 "McAfee Labs Threats Report." Protecting patients' data with technology Patient portals engender patient engagement and loyalty, but if a data breach occurs, that loyalty is quickly lost. Besides losing patients’ trust, healthcare organizations that experience a data breach face potentially severe HIPAA penalties. Healthcare firms can learn a great deal from how other industries have met similar security challenges without overburdening consumers. Providers can use best-in-class technologies, data and analytics systems, and their deep understanding of patient needs to manage risks and protect patient identities. To arm providers against breaches, Experian Health offers Precise ID® with Digital Risk Score to protect portal users’ identities from their first sign-in to their last. By automating the portal signup process, it stops false enrollments at the source. Then, using multilayer verification, it provides access protection for future sessions. Because Precise ID takes less than a second to evaluate access risks, patients don't need to sit through loading screens. On the provider side, Precise ID satisfies the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services' Promoting Interoperability standards, minimizing compliance risks. At a time when one in five patients withhold information from physicians because of data breach concerns, Precise ID builds trust between patients and providers by protecting patients' data from unauthorized access. Giving patients the power to access their medical information through portal technology has been one of the past decade's biggest steps forward in improving patient-provider relationships. But with that reward comes responsibility: Providers must protect portals from unauthorized access and theft of medical records. With Precise ID with Digital Risk Score, providers get the security they need, and patients get the seamless access they've come to expect.

Making phone calls, filling out paperwork, and chasing down debt shouldn’t take up the bulk of a healthcare organization’s daily schedule. Now more than ever, physicians have little time to provide high-quality care to their patients. In 2015, the American College of Physicians (ACP) put forth the Patients Before Paperwork initiative to address the burdens that these administrative tasks create for physicians and their staff. The ACP states that defining and mitigating administrative tasks is essential to improve an organization’s workflow and reduce physician burnout. Through utilizing healthcare workflow automation, you can improve productivity without overextending employees' duties. Instead, your team can spend more time caring for patients and helping them with the financial side of their experience, which is something both patients and doctors prefer. Easier access with automated healthcare solutions In the new wave of consumerism, there is a high demand for convenience and transparency in every transaction. Healthcare providers and organizations also face this pressure, but the industry has been slower to transform because patient care transactions are infinitely more complicated than online retail purchases. Despite the slow go, healthcare workflow automation technology and organizations are starting to catch up. For example, engagement is a defining factor for today’s healthcare consumers. However, engagement must be mindfully catered to specific situations. When it comes to scheduling appointments, patients actually prefer an automated healthcare workflow approach over talking to a human. Regardless of its form, engagement is still essential in all aspects of the care continuum, and physicians can find it hard to engage when every administrative task has to be completed by hand. If you’re still devoting time and resources to manual patient access tasks, you're not only falling behind in the competitive healthcare industry, but you’re also missing an opportunity to enhance the overall patient experience. Fortunately, countless tasks — scheduling, preregistration, registration, and admissions — are no longer paper-based and don’t require nearly as much hands-on involvement as they used to. Given this reality, automated healthcare solutions can and should take are of scheduling and other mundane tasks. Ultimately, automation will allow administrative employees to focus on other areas of engagement, like financial counseling for patients. Employees will have more time to help patients understand their financial obligations and perhaps set up a payment plan before procedures, avoiding the sticker shock of a surprise bill months later. The touchless approach In the Patients Before Paperwork initiative mentioned above, the ACP concluded that “excessive administrative tasks have serious adverse consequences for physicians and their patients.” At Experian Health, our automated healthcare solutions reduce those consequences by creating a touchless approach that only requires human intervention for exceptional cases. A touchless, automated healthcare workflow makes patient access predictable so you can spend more time serving patients. For example, our eCare NEXT® solution is a single platform that automates every step of the revenue cycle. Users only work on prescreened accounts with actionable follow-ups. Touchless Processing™ takes care of the rest through intelligent automation. You can effectively implement Touchless Processing throughout the rest of your organization by integrating eCare NEXT with Experian's other solutions: Registration QA When eCare NEXT is integrated with Registration QA, for instance, you can automatically access patients’ insurance eligibility in real time and identify registration inaccuracies early in the revenue cycle. This significantly reduces claims denials that can cut into revenue and take up more time to correct and resubmit. Payer-specific information can also be stored and automatically updated to ensure accuracy every time that payer comes up. Authorizations You can carry the touchless approach even further by expanding your suite of solutions with our Authorizations.The platform automates authorization management using the payer authorization requirements already stored and updated in the system. Authorization completes inquiries and submissions without user intervention to further reduce denials and expedite reimbursements. When done manually, administrative tasks related to orders, scheduling, preregistration, registration, and admissions are a drain on any healthcare organization’s resources. Minimizing staff involvement in these tasks improves the experience for physicians and patients alike, but it requires automated healthcare workflow solutions that can be seamlessly integrated into the workflow. With Experian Health’s Touchless Processing solutions, providers can exercise greater control over these tasks and significantly improve revenue recovery. This will give physicians and employees more time to focus on creating a more efficient, effective, and positive experience for everyone involved.

No two healthcare organizations are the same. Each has varied workflows that optimize efficacy and overall care for patients. That’s why healthcare software solutions should never be considered one-size-fits-all approaches. It isn’t fair, or terribly productive, to force healthcare organizations to adapt to new software. Rather, the healthcare software should adapt to them. At Experian Health, we’ll never supply a software product and then expect you to adjust workflows to suit it. Instead, we embed ourselves into your company to ensure we deeply understand your productivity needs and the reasons behind them. Only then can we tailor the solution we provide around you. It’s never too early to get it right The conversation about customizing your healthcare organization's solution begins before you even sign up. As soon as a solution interests you, we’ll start looking at how to tailor it to your unique needs. We’ll hold a meeting that includes subject matter experts and implementation leadership groups to uncover your greatest usability needs. Then, we’ll document those needs to better prepare whoever runs your project and ensure he or she has all the necessary information upfront. Then, gears start moving during the sales process. After choosing a solution, our team of experts works with members from every department in your organization to iron out the appropriate design and functionality details. We believe the people who will be using and relying on the solution every day should have a significant say in these details. However, we’ll do all the legwork of actually building and implementing the solution itself. By the time we’re ready to run internal tests to make sure the software works, members of every department will already know what to expect. Consequently, when they run user acceptance tests to check whether the solution fits into their workflows, they can accurately measure the solution’s performance against their input into its design. Afterward, we can iron out any hiccups they run into before initiating the organizationwide training and “go live” steps of the process. It’s never too late to make adjustments Our deep involvement in customizing your solution also begins before you select it, and it continues long after it's successfully implemented. We don’t go away just because we marked you as “live.” Instead, we understand that the healthcare industry is in constant flux and you might experience operational changes that warrant additional tinkering and tailoring to our solutions. We’ll stick around for a couple of days after going live, and we’ll stay available forever after, just in case. For example, if you purchase a new physician group six months after going live, you’ll face quite an uphill battle onboarding them all into your software system and, in turn, getting them up to speed. Because the group is new, you might face opposition to bringing on any change in general. In this case, you could use help facilitating the training and the adoption of your system into this new group, and that's where we step in. Additionally, what if this implementation requires a work queue structure that’s vastly different from yours? If the new group operates in a different area of the state, they might also have unique rules for some of their payers. These rules have to be incorporated into their system to accommodate the patient population. None of this, though, should fall solely on your shoulders. We can worry about the system's features so you can focus on the operational change management aspect. For our clients, we’re always on call. This devoted availability could range from six months or even six years. Whatever the situation, we know that you’ll eventually face circumstances that your software wasn’t originally designed to address. Instead of feeling stuck and frustrated, clients can find comfort in knowing we are here for every step of the process. And beyond tailoring your solution before implementing it, we also offer continued customization to help you tackle new circumstances without compromising workflow. Overall, here at Experian Health, we understand the pressures facing healthcare organizations today, and we are eager to be partners with you in securing the best solution for you needs and guiding you through the challenges ahead.

Seven years ago, Bill's healthcare group invested in a new health information system, and the dust still hasn’t quite settled. Like most health information system providers, Bill's vendor communicates mostly through the group’s IT leader. He has to pick and choose what updates and features are implemented, and the people who work with the system daily are expected to figure out how to make the most out of it. Fortunately, Bill and the head of IT are great pals. They eat lunch together, go out for after-work cocktails, and try to bridge the gap between their healthcare software vendor and the end users on the frontline. But Bill shouldn’t have to rely on that friendship for his healthcare team members to be able to do their jobs, and it shouldn't have taken seven years for the software to be properly integrated. Bill's not a real person, and his healthcare group is fictitious, but both are archetypes of the new healthcare landscape. Constant market changes and ongoing challenges have forced healthcare systems to partner more closely with medical software vendors. However, it’s challenging to find vendors that are willing to roll up their sleeves and work alongside the end users to design solutions that are tailored to their specific needs. At Experian Health, we want to make sure the first experience your team has with our health information system products is a positive one and that you all look forward to using them every day. Your group’s success is our top priority, and playing an active role in your onboarding process helps ensure that success. Providing health information systems and the knowledge to use them The problem with the archetype of Bill is that the end users in the group had to take on the tasks of learning and optimizing the system themselves. Trainers lacked the deep level of understanding needed to create enthusiasm about the system, and overall adoption lagged. By contrast, we know our solutions like the back of our hands, so it only makes sense for us to share that knowledge and collaborate to implement those solutions through medical software training. With years of experience under our belt working with healthcare organizations across the country, we’ve heard virtually every possible question end users ask. That experience gives us the flexibility to come up with on-the-fly solutions to challenges we haven’t thought of yet and suggest ways to optimize your group’s workflow with the system. We can offer shortcuts, tips, and tricks to make the system work more efficiently for your team. Collaborative onboarding lets our clients dive deeper into learning their new systems than they could by just reading predetermined lesson plans and FAQ lists. It helps us when we help you make the medical software training go smoother and ensure all end users actually want to use the product. In fact, for the first three to five months, Experian will be a physical presence at your organization, helping with change management and the onboarding process. Personalized, effective onboarding The process differs depending on how complex your organization is and what you’re installing, but typically, collaborative onboarding adheres to the following timeline: We start the process with a formal kickoff and demo to get executive leadership and everyone on the frontline up to speed. The demo lays out what the project will look like for the group and gives everyone the chance to start considering how to operationalize it for the organization. After the kickoff, our teams collaborate with specific subject matter experts and start digging into the nitty-gritty design and functionality detail work. We really stress the importance of operational input from people who will be champions for their specific areas, not just the IT teams. These champions need to communicate the details of the system’s design to their peers. When the design is complete, we do all of the heavy lifting to build the product, and then we conduct internal testing to make sure it works effectively. Next, we guide operational champions through user-acceptance testing to make sure the product meets their needs. User-acceptance testing occurs in a real-life, day-to-day setting so users can validate that it fits into their workflow. Once we iron out any changes warranted by the user-acceptance testing, we extend training into the larger workforce and officially go live. A month later, we come back and hold an optimization workshop to observe users in action. We can answer questions and provide suggestions on how to improve efficiency even further or make tweaks to improve user processes. With the rush to adopt faster and more efficient technology, many healthcare organizations have been left in the dust to figure out how to make new technology work best for them. At Experian Health, we stick around after software implementation to make sure your entire organization can hit the ground running. Our mission is to help the healthcare industry succeed in providing better, more comprehensive care to patients, and collaborative onboarding ensures our products do just that.

In a new whitepaper, Technology and Data-Driven Decisions Driving Best Practices for Patient Collections, Experian Health analyzes the results of two recently fielded surveys aimed at learning how organizations approach the process of obtaining payment from patients. The paper reviews both an HFMA-led survey and an Experian Health-facilitated one, discussing the current state of patient collections, as well as emerging best practices to improve performance. While knowing that organizations are working with varying degrees of success to offer more patient-friendly financial interactions, using technology and data to inform and drive patient engagement, Experian Health wanted to understand the best practices that organizations are using to elevate performance in patient collections. Our findings were published in this HFMA whitepaper which discuss the findings from these two research projects and validate best practices and offer unique insight into the successes and shortfalls of the patient financial experience at health organizations.

Manually cold-calling patients to remind them of upcoming appointments or of bills nearing a due date has never been an effective engagement strategy. On the contrary, such reactive tactics reduce engagement quality and can harm revenue cycles. It's important to remember that real connection empowers patients to be proactive in their care and improve their own outcomes, which encourages them to keep up with future appointments and medical payments. For modern healthcare organizations, maintaining this level of high engagement requires more than the automatic actions they’ve grown used to. Instead, the overall healthcare world needs more robust patient engagement to push forward and stay relevant with patients. Without this change, organizations are more likely to encounter skipped appointments, preventable readmissions, missed payments, revenue loss on several fronts, and poor patient outcomes. Fortunately, Experian Health offers a range of solutions that make it easy to engage patients in their care, improve patient outcomes, and create more profitable revenue cycle management (RCM) throughout an entire organization. Using patient engagement technology to improve care As previously mentioned in an Experian Health blog, patient portal technology — among others — is rewiring the technological landscape and capabilities in the physician and patient relationship. Portals are used for secure messaging by 41 percent of family practice physicians, and 35 percent of physicians also use them for patient education. This type of patient engagement technology culminates in our Patient Self-Service portal, which pools together data from our Patient Estimates, Patient Statements, and Coverage Discovery tools. The portal gives patients a single point of access to request estimates, pay bills, check financial assistance eligibility, and receive advice from doctors, nurses, and specialists. The above are just a few results from elevated, proactive patient engagement. Another perk is the portal’s unique ability to automatically populate patient-specific and payer-specific information into each estimate for optimal accuracy. This feature gives patients peace of mind by knowing what their exact out-of-pocket expenses amount to. When they receive a bill that matches the estimates they’ve been budgeting for, patients are more likely to adhere to payment obligations and return to a healthcare organization for future medical needs. This also makes it easier for an organization to collect payment at point of service and throughout the rest of the patient’s care continuum. Risk stratification for more successful revenue recovery For the first time in history, there is a growing convergence of powerful, internet-connected personal devices and massive amounts of analytical, social, financial, and behavioral data tied to individual patients. Experian Health’s timely patient engagement tools allow providers to tap into this convergence to revolutionize how they engage with patients at all points throughout their care. For example, by analyzing patient-specific financial information, this engagement technology can help providers identify when patients may benefit from financial assistance, especially for upcoming treatments. In turn, the provider can send the patient information about how to request for this type of assistance through an interactive portal with accurate estimates. To help reduce readmission rates for non-critical concerns, Experian Health’s tools can also help identify when patients may need unique, targeted engagement. For instance, patients with heart conditions can benefit from information regarding diet and lifestyle changes that improve cardiovascular health. These tools help providers determine the best type of content to send and the appropriate medium to send it through, such as email, text, or app notifications, according to the patient’s specific preferences. By working together with healthcare providers, Experian Health’s solutions combine highly personalized self-service with accurate price transparency and patient-risk stratification to proactively engage with patients. You, too, can be at the forefront of improving patient outcomes and RCM strategy effectiveness by understanding the changing healthcare environment. Utilizing tools, such as a patient portal and others, can position your organization to increase patient engagement and benefit from being a forward-facing healthcare provider.

Healthcare has always been driven by data, and today, providers have access to an unprecedented amount from a wide variety of sources. While this influx could be a blessing to the healthcare industry as a whole, it also poses a number of challenges, particularly when it comes to patient identity management. With a soaring volume of patient information coming in from numerous sources, identity errors become increasingly more likely, as well as the potential consequence of fatal mistakes. Keeping this in mind, the importance of effective identity management cannot be overstated. Every year, an estimated 195,000 people die due to medical mistakes. More than half of those deaths – 10 out of every 17 – are the result of identity management errors, such as duplicate records and mistaken patient identities. While current healthcare IT solutions attempt to tackle these discrepancies, they only succeed in identifying about 10 percent of all duplicate records. Consequently, patients often undergo repeated tests or receive incorrect treatment or medication that can result in adverse effects to their health. Also, there is limited coordination of patient data throughout the healthcare ecosystem. The main culprit of this is the lack of secure data transfers that compromise patient records and identity. This raises the question: How can healthcare organizations better manage the massive amounts of data related to each patient’s medical identity? Luckily, such issues can be improved with Experian Health’s Universal Identity Manager (UIM), which creates a single identity for individual patients across multiple disparate healthcare databases. Upgrade your identity management system The ability to share patient information across multiple healthcare organizations with different care management programs is at the core of optimizing overall patient care. Properly utilizing patient and population health data can dramatically improve an organization’s efficiency, raise its quality of care, and lower its readmissions rate. For patient data to be useful, however, providers require a robust infrastructure that allows for secure, precise, and accurate storage of patient data. The same framework should be able to assign patients unique identities across the entire network. In turn, a single, universal patient identity system allows for better analytical insights and more effective care personalization. This kind of management system also allows an organization to add relevant data to a patient’s medical profile faster and more accurately, creating an improved dynamic database that can develop personalized patient engagement and care plans. How Experian Health’s universal identity management software helps Administrative slip-ups in healthcare can have drastic consequences for a patient’s health and wellbeing. Eliminating these inaccuracies is the main goal of Experian Health’s UIM solution. Experian Health has the benefit of leveraging data assets available to us from being part of broader Experian. As a result, the identity management software generates and assigns a unique identifier to each patient that remains consistent across various healthcare systems, such as hospitals, therapeutic facilities, pharmacies, and healthcare payers. Drawing on decades of experience in identity management, Experian Health's multi-matching methodology approach eliminates duplicate and erroneous data through comprehensive search and alert processes. It provides a high degree of likeliness because it expands beyond the limitations of the conventional single-matching methodology that most health systems use today. Even records created on disparate healthcare systems can be automatically analyzed and assigned to the appropriate patient identity. In addition to eliminating discrepancies that could affect the quality of patient care, universal identity management also reduces medical and billing errors, ultimately minimizing an organization's risk of fraud. The solution also works in tandem with Experian Health’s suite of patient engagement and transparency tools, including its Patient Self-Service portal, to further optimize an organization’s ability to deliver personalized, high-quality care. Unique patient identifiers are critical for healthcare organizations to reduce the risks of inaccurate and duplicate records that lead to errors and low-quality care. Combined with Experian Health's suite of patient engagement and price transparency tools, its identity management software is a leap toward making efficient and reliable interoperability more possible across the healthcare ecosystem.