Mississippi Division of Medicaid

Medicaid is a national healthcare program that helps pay for medical services for low-income people. The Mississippi Division of Medicaid, in the Office of the Governor, is designated by state statute as the single state agency responsible for administering Medicaid in Mississippi. The Mississippi Division of Medicaid has more than 900 employees located throughout one central office, 30 regional offices, and more than 80 outstations.

The mission of the Mississippi Division of Medicaid is to ensure access to health services for the Medicaid-eligible population in the most cost efficient and comprehensive manner possible and to continually pursue strategies for optimizing the accessibility and quality of health care.

Mississippi DOM was looking to improve care quality, fuel more informed clinical decision making, and manage data electronically for Mississippi Medicaid patients. To accomplish this Mississippi DOM took steps to establish one of the nation’s first interfaces between Medicaid and Epic to share Medicaid clinical data with the state’s largest Medicaid provider. They worked to create a single identifier for each Medicaid beneficiary and provide University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) doctors with an electronic medical history of DOM patients including their medications, diagnoses, and allergies.

The Rhapsody EMPI provides enterprise master person index (EMPI) patient matching solution in partnership with MedeAnalytics to reconcile Medicaid records and create a single patient identifier for Mississippi Division of Medicaid (DOM).

With the EMPI more than 2.3 million Mississippi DOM patient records were analyzed and deduplicated. This record cleanup has yielded a single identifier for over 750,000 Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) beneficiaries. The EMPI allows for the exchange of Medicaid data to the UMMC.

Additionally a single patient identifier became the source of truth for new patient records coming into the Mississippi database. Medicaid providers are now able to access data from a state-wide MPI that allows administrators to manage a longitudinal patient record. Administrative waste in manual lookup and identification were also reduced because of the Rhapsody EMPI. The EMPI also gives providers an increased trust and confidence in data quality and accuracy.