For health tech organizations, ensuring clean and reliable identity data is critical—for operational efficiency, maintaining customer trust, and meeting growth goals. Enterprise master person index (EMPI) solutions help solve data challenges, and choosing the right EMPI vendor means increased efficiencies, lower costs, and a great ability to scale your product.
Here are eight essential questions product leaders should ask when evaluating EMPI solutions:
- Was this EMPI designed specifically for healthcare?
The complexities of healthcare data are unique, and managing patient identity in healthcare requires precision and care. Some vendors offer products designed for other industries and tweak them to work in healthcare, but these often miss the mark when it comes to the accuracy, safety, and compliance healthcare demands. Mistakes lead to serious consequences, including risks to patient care and regulatory issues.
As a product leader, you need an EMPI solution that understands these nuances. Choose one that is purpose-built for healthcare, ensuring it can handle the unique challenges of healthcare data and processes while remaining reliable and ready to grow with your needs.
- Does this EMPI support integration and interoperability?
Integration challenges are among the biggest barriers to innovation in health tech. Whether you’re integrating data from wearable devices, EHRs, or other digital health platforms, or scaling after M&A activity, your EMPI needs seamless interoperability.
An EMPI that’s hard to integrate leads to incomplete or unreliable connections, problems that grow as your organization expands. Most EMPI failures stem from integration issues.
Look for an EMPI solution from a vendor with a deep understanding of data integration and proven capabilities to adapt to diverse systems, ensuring smooth data flow and a seamless user experience as you grow.
- Will this EMPI solution scale to support future growth?
As your product scales and customer base expands, the volume and diversity of your data will grow too. Some EMPI solutions can’t keep up with the growing volume of data and the real-time nature of healthcare, leading to slow performance and inaccurate results.
Choose an EMPI with a track record of scaling to support enterprise customers, high availability SLAs, and global expansion without compromising speed or accuracy.
- How does this EMPI handle populations that can’t be matched with reference data?
Health tech companies often manage data for diverse populations, including minors protected by privacy laws like COPPA, undocumented individuals, or those with limited credit histories. These groups often lack reliable reference data, making accurate patient identification challenging.
To address this, your EMPI should leverage advanced algorithms—such as AI-driven methods—to ensure accurate matching even without external reference data. This capability is essential to minimize gaps in analytics, improve efficiency, and maintain customer trust while delivering reliable data for all demographics.
- How does this EMPI minimize record duplicates and overlays?
Duplicate or mismatched records disrupt analytics, product functionality, and user trust. An efficient EMPI should offer automated and procedural methods to detect and resolve inconsistencies, ensuring data quality while freeing up engineering and data science resources to focus on innovation.
- What data stewardship does this EMPI provide?
An effective EMPI should offer automated workflows, clear access to patient data history, and controls to reduce errors and improve matching—without adding unnecessary complexity or strain.
Whether you plan to leverage these capabilities out of the gate, your EMPI should empower both your internal teams and your customers to resolve issues confidently, reducing operational burdens and enhancing trust in your platform.
- Does this EMPI have flexible deployment capabilities?
Health tech organizations operate in diverse environments, from cloud-first startups to enterprises with global on-premises needs.
Ideally, your EMPI provider will manage the implementation, empowering your IT team to focus on priorities while ensuring a seamless process for you. Choose an EMPI solution that offers flexible deployment models—cloud, SaaS, or on-premises—to align with your organization’s requirements and support customer preferences.
- Does this EMPI leverage AI to enhance data accuracy and efficiency?
AI-powered matching revolutionizes data accuracy by identifying patterns that traditional methods miss. For health tech companies, this means less manual effort, improved product functionality, and faster time-to-market for new features.
By automating error detection and resolution, AI-enabled EMPIs reduce operational costs and allow your teams to focus on delivering value to your customers.
Need a deep dive on how to integrate an EMPI into your solutions?
Position your platform for growth with the right EMPI solution
An EMPI is more than a tool—it’s a foundation for scaling your health tech platform efficiently and confidently. By asking these eight questions, you identify the solution that addresses today’s challenges and supports your long-term goals for innovation and growth.
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