Each year, there are millions of British Columbians and out-of-province visitors who present at local health care facilities across the lower mainland. Due to the volume of visits, there is a possibility that a patient’s health record could be incomplete, incorrect or even in some cases duplicated.

Protecting the integrity of these records are a dedicated group of health professionals within Health Information Management.

Data remediation is the process of reviewing, investigating, and updating/correcting patient identity information such as name, date of birth, gender, PHN (Personal Healthcare Number), address, and deceased date, to ensure the person record is linking to their provincial healthcare profile. This profile exists at the Ministry of Health, Enterprise Master Patient Index (MoH EMPI), considered the authoritative source of truth to manage healthcare identity.

The EMPI contains patient demographic information and personal health numbers of all clients who access healthcare in BC, including residents and visitors. The EMPI will assist in identifying duplicates, or discrepant records, and highlight this information for the healthcare facilities to “remediate.”

The Data Remediation team is a special project within the Clinical and Systems Transformation (CST) Project; that consists of Health Information Management leadership, business analysts and data clerks who work closely with Ministry of Health, CST Data Legacy Team, IT systems analysts and health organization staff.

HIM Data Remediation team members:
• Karen Davids – Manager
• Mary Tucker – Team Lead/ Business Analyst
• Christine Lee – Business Analyst
• Lolita Chevalier – ETL Developer/BI Analyst
• Janice Lofstrom – Data Remediation Clerk
• Cecilia Chan – Data Remediation Clerk
• Nilem Hassanali – Data Remediation Clerk – former member
• Jennifer Ferrer – Data Remediation Clerk – former member
• Tak Wei Poon – Data Remediation Clerk – former member
• Leslie Moser – Data Remediation Clerk – former member
• Gurpreet Pannu – Data Remediation Clerk – former member

Data discrepancies lead to patient identity issues, which impacts the quality of healthcare services and delivery. As a result the Data Remediation Team was formed, to coordinate and remediate the acute patient registration databases across Vancouver Coastal Health, Providence Health Care and Provincial Health Services Authority, and ultimately, reduce client demographic discrepancies.

The data remediation team reviews thousands of records to ensure:
• Patient data is clean, conforming to Ministry of Health (MoH) EMPI standards.
• Patient data is loaded into the MoH EMPI.
• Health record integrity is maintained on an ongoing basis.

From July 2014 to current date, the Data Remediation team has reviewed over 270, 000 records.

A future with CST

Accurate client identity is the foundation of any electronic health record. With the roll-out of the CST Cerner project across health organizations (PHC, VCH and PHSA) accurate client identity data is fundamental to the linking of client identity records across the multiple registration systems in use today.

From your registration, to the EMPI, to data remediation, everyone operates under the “one person, one record” principle to maintain a system that is built on client safety and service.