Federal guidelines embrace importance of patient addresses for health IT developers powering analytics, patient matching, and overall care
Rancho Santa Margarita, CALIF – August 30, 2023 – Melissa, a leading provider of global data quality, identity verification, and address management solutions, today announced its support of healthcare practice management providers in meeting compliance with Project US@, a federal data initiative to create a unified, industrywide specification for representing patient addresses.
“Good data always matters, but in healthcare it has the power to improve the standard of care,” said Bud Walker, Vice President, Enterprise Sales and Strategy, Melissa. “With Project US@, the federal government acknowledges that standardized patient address data is foundational to processes that advance population health as well as optimize practice management.”
Project US@ was established by the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology to create standards for patient address information. The initiative leverages the expertise of the USPS®, the nation’s authority on addresses and related data quality standards. Project US@’s primary goal is to improve patient matching across healthcare’s broad spectrum of clinical and administrative processes, enhancing the performance of patient matching algorithms through improved address quality.
Determining if records correctly refer to a specific patient is critical to patient safety, whether the record is held within a single healthcare organization or across different healthcare organizations. Greater accuracy also improves administrative processes and the interoperability of patient records. By adopting Project US@, practice management platforms anticipate a reduced burden associated with developing and continuously working to improve patient query and matching efficiency, errors in de-duplicating patient records and billing, and other challenges.
“Address verification has been integral to our offering since day one. By tapping into Melissa’s data quality tools, our platform ensures comprehensive attention to clean data,” said Tom Langan, President and Chief Commercial Officer of Veradigm Inc. (NASDAQ:MDRX), a healthcare technology company that drives value through its unique combination of platforms, data, expertise, connectivity, and scale. “Today, our Veradigm Practice Management users have access to a Project US@-compliant platform that recognizes address standardization and verification is important not just for practice management but for all phases and levels of healthcare operations.”
Melissa’s Address Object and Personator tools are in compliance with the Project US@ Technical Specification for Patient Addresses Domestic and Military, Version 1.0. These products validate address information at the point of entry in patient registration and standardize address information according to USPS® guidelines. With Melissa’s support, practice management platforms can verify, standardize, and correct postal addresses with a USPS® CASS & Canada Post SERP Certified address engine, updating missing or incorrect information in real time. Duplicates are matched and eliminated, meeting a critical goal of Project US@. This includes all-in-one verification and standardization capabilities that leverage a comprehensive dataset of billions of consumer records to validate that phone numbers, email addresses, social security numbers (SSN), and full names are valid and associated with a particular individual.
Melissa’s Project US@ support is an extension of its long list of cloud, industry, and postal compliance certifications, including HIPAA, HITECH, and HITRUST for Protected Health Information (PHI). These certifications underscore Melissa’s commitment to security and quality, and its deep experience in protecting and managing personally identifiable information (PII) and financial data.
Click here for more insight on Melissa’s Project US@-compliant tools and services. To connect with members of Melissa’s global intelligence team, visit www.Melissa.com or call 1-800-MELISSA.
About Melissa
Since 1985, Melissa has specialized in global intelligence solutions to help organizations unlock accurate data for a more compelling customer view. More than 10,000 clients worldwide in arenas such as retail, education, healthcare, insurance, finance, and government, rely on Melissa for full spectrum data quality and ID verification software, including data matching, validation, and enhancement services to gain critical insight and drive meaningful customer relationships. For more information or free product trials, visit www.Melissa.com or call 1-800-MELISSA (635-4772).
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