Andy joined Verato as Chief Marketing Officer in March 2024, and leads the go-to-market strategy, planning and execution globally for Verato’s market-leading hMDM platform and solutions. Prior to joining Verato, Andy held leadership roles in innovation, go-to-market, and product management at SAP Health Sciences, GE Healthcare, Tableau, Alteryx, and MedeAnalytics. Andy is passionate about healthcare innovation and authors the Health Sciences Strategy Blog (www.HealthScienceStrategy.com) which has a readership spanning 47 countries. He has been quoted and published in leading healthcare publications and is a member of the Forbes Communication Council and the Fast Company Executive Board. Andy holds master’s degrees in engineering and business on scholarships from leading institutions in the US, Canada and Israel. He has completed executive management programs from Harvard Business School, the Sloan School of Management at MIT, and the Kellogg School of Management. His thought leadership can be accessed at www.andyde.com/thoughtleadership.
In this Q&A, Andy discusses Verato’s pioneering role in transforming healthcare identity management as well as the importance of master data management for maintaining AI and analytics data fidelity and readiness.
Q: What is Verato and what is its pioneering role in healthcare data management?
Andy: Verato delivers a cloud-native person-matching platform designed to link and match identities across disparate sources and solve the problem of knowing who is who. The company’s hMDM (healthcare master data management) platform works with healthcare providers, payers, government, life sciences, and financial services organizations to enable identity data management with the most accuracy of any vendor. Leveraging its patented approach to referential matching, at scale, within and across data silos, the platform enables clients to deliver better healthcare and personalized customer experiences that are cost-effective, easier to implement, and scalable compared to traditional matching technology.
Q: Can you describe the current state of data management in healthcare?
Andy: As the identity experts in healthcare, Verato published a survey in December 2023 that provided new insights into healthcare executives’ data management strategies. The survey revealed that the vast majority (98%) of healthcare executives expect an increase in data requests from other organizations, and 97% predict an increase in data coming into their organizations from external sources.
With this influx of data, 57% of healthcare executives believe that patient data-matching errors could lead to a healthcare crisis within the next five to 10 years. With the rise of AI technologies in healthcare, accurate provider data management and patient matching are crucial to AI’s success.
Q: As Chief Marketing Officer at Verato, how do you see identity data management evolving in healthcare, and why is it critical for improving patient outcomes?
Andy: When it comes to healthcare consumer identity management, clean data is critical to outcomes for individuals and the industry. This goes beyond just patient, member and provider data matching and focuses on managing the data about the person and all the relationships they have across their care continuum. As healthcare becomes more interoperable, it’s increasingly necessary to reconcile conflicting or incomplete data from clinical and non-clinical sources. Failure to do so results in bad data proliferating throughout a healthcare system and beyond, an error that can harm individual patients, as well as derail entire initiatives such as AI, while adding astronomical yet completely avoidable costs of healthcare delivery that can be mitigated by effective hMDM.
Q: Verato was recently recognized in the Gartner Hype Cycle. Why is this significant?
Andy: Many HCOs use the Gartner® Hype Cycle™ report as a decision-making tool to make informed decisions about when to invest in, adopt, or implement emerging technologies. It helps them avoid jumping on trends too early (when the technology is overhyped) or too late (after the market has matured).
Verato has been recognized in Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Real-Time Health System Technologies for five consecutive years, underscoring our leadership in healthcare identity data management.
Read more about it here
Q: How does Verato’s approach to identity resolution differentiate it from other solutions in the healthcare sector?
Andy: Accurate linking of medical records from diverse sources is critical for patient experience, care delivery, and patient outcomes, yet failure to do so remains a pervasive issue in the U.S. The rate at which patients are correctly matched to their medical data can be as low as 50% when electronic health information is exchanged between organizations. Verato’s patented approach to referential matching is the next generation of patient matching technology to assist enterprises in bridging this gap. It matches demographic data from each record to a curated, comprehensive and continuously updated reference database of identities. This database contains identities from the entire adult U.S. population, including a complete profile of demographic data from a 30-year history and the identities of 9 million healthcare practitioners. The approach combines a proprietary matching algorithm that is designed to act on the nuances of a customer’s identity records and curated reference identities, enabling it to make matches that other algorithms cannot. As a matter of fact, over 80% of all patient data in the U.S. passes through the Verato IDM platform.
To learn more about Verato’s unique approach to healthcare master data management (hMDM), visit the Verato website.