Verato announced at HIMSS17 this week a partnership with RightPatient to together offer a cloud-based system that addresses the comprehensive challenge of patient identity – spanning every point of encounter and extending through every repository of pre-existing medical records and information, Verato said.

The partnership integrates RightPatient’s biometric patient identification platform with the Verato cloud-based patient matching platform to recognize a patient automatically at the moment of encounter and link that patient to all of his or her data distributed across systems. The partnership provides enterprises a single point of convergence for the full lifecycle of patient data, according to the vendors.

RightPatient’s biometric technology handles the front-end portion of the patient identity issue, which is how to accurately identify a patient and ensure retrieval of the correct medical record. RightPatient uses a biometrics and deep-learning engine that claims to eliminate errors at the point of identity capture, the vendor contended. RightPatient technology integrates with popular electronic health records systems including Epic, as well as with many patient portals, telehealth platforms and self-service applications, the vendor said.

Verato’s cloud-based matching handles the back-end portion of the patient identity issue, which is the linking of all pre-existing data to the correct identity. Verato’s technology is based on a type of matching called “referential matching” that uses a universal nationwide reference database as its answer key, the vendor explained. Referential matching can link identities across systems and between enterprises, even in the presence of major data differences, time differences, errors and thin data that prevent other matching technologies from matching, Verato said.