LexisNexis® Risk Solutions Optimizes De-Identified Data Matching with Patient Centric Token

WHAT the challenge you were looking to solve was?

Medical research is notorious for not including participants representative of the diversity of our country, relying upon incomplete patient journeys viewed through the lens of only one of the many health providers we all visit. From COVID-19 and maternal mortality to diabetes and heart disease, healthcare inequities are pervasive in the healthcare system.

There are more than five billion permutations of 285 million U.S. adult identities due to address and name changes during a person’s lifetime. Current methods of relating de-identified data do not work when a person’s name or address changes, so their data remains fragmented.

Historically, barriers have limited data sharing, restricting the ability to improve or measure patient outcomes. This disconnect limits the longitudinal view of a patient, impacting the ability to understand differences in patient populations, or control for various risk factors in research populations – factors that can have a dramatic impact on the research results.

Ongoing shifts in the healthcare industry continue to drive moves toward more data sharing between disparate data systems to positively impact patient outcomes, drug efficacy, precision medicine and treatment pathways. This increase in data sharing has created a need for accurate linking of patient records, as well as records beyond the clinical setting. Accurately linking the data while also ensuring data security and patient privacy has been the unsolvable problem in the industry until now.

WHO was involved in the innovation?

The Health Care business of LexisNexis® Risk Solutions, the leading provider of healthcare identity resolution and insights, developed the LexisNexis® Patient Centric Token, a first of its kind, patent pending, token that provides advanced data de-identification technology at the patient level with unmatched precision.

WHAT the innovation entailed?

The Patient Centric Token solves for data matching complexities with an evolutionary technology that leaps all market-available solutions. Utilizing decades of experience aggregating, normalizing, and linking billions of records across thousands of data sources, LexisNexis Risk Solutions can precisely link patient records that contain variations in personally identifiable information (PII) presented at the point of de-identification.

LexisNexis Risk Solutions uses a proprietary combination of datasets to create a singular, comprehensive, patient-centric healthcare data token. The result is a token resilient to changes in PII over time, linking patients together across variations in PII. This reduces cost and complexity of managing multiple tokens. This key differentiator of this next-generation token enables life sciences and other healthcare organizations to securely and accurately access patient level data that would otherwise be unavailable.

With the LexisNexis Patient Centric Token, a de-identified record can be enhanced with other datasets from LexisNexis Risk Solutions like social determinants of health data (SDOH), medical claims data and mortality data to offer a more precise patient longitudinal view missing from other data offerings in the market.

This patient-centric feature provides the healthcare industry with an ability to join de-identified patient records that would otherwise go unmatched, thus providing users of this data with a more comprehensive and complete view of an individual, while maintaining strict compliance with security and de-identification requirements.

By combining the Patient Centric Token with data assets that offer a complete picture of the patient – medical events and electronic health records (EHR), along with SDOH – healthcare organizations can leverage data and analytics to assess effectiveness and gaps between efficacy and real-world treatment impacts to overall cost.

By accessing this de-identified single token with a longitudinal view, researchers can test the efficacy of drugs and outcomes, validating research and development of new products. Organizations can use our de-identified single token to validate the performance of an intervention under ‘real-world’ conditions.

In addition, linking to other datasets that tie back to a broader view of the patient help control for differences in the population but also potentially identify similar characteristics that are tied to different levels of effectiveness.

HOW it generated results?

LexisNexis Patient Centric Token represents a watershed moment for healthcare. It solves the challenge of maintaining strict data privacy and security, while enabling researchers and other healthcare stakeholders to safely combine disparate datasets to accelerate more effective clinical research and patient care.

The healthcare industry today collects and stores incredible amounts of data throughout the system, yet very little of that data can be shared due to HIPAA or other data privacy regulations. The Patient Centric Token maintains compliance with those restrictions while also liberating that data to be used for its intended purpose – to deliver better, more effective, patient-centric care.

By aggregating all available data for an individual, LexisNexis Risk Solutions enables use cases and solves problems that cannot be met by existing approaches. The result: the LexisNexis Patient Centric Token was able to more accurately match variations in PII to a single identity, reducing identity duplication by up to 20% based on varying PII elements and time periods covered by the datasets. This ability to correctly link records of different claims and clinical events over time is the critical step the industry needs to better inform outcomes research.