How to stop the cost tsunami in provider data cleansing

by April Stiles

Navigating in the sea of disparate provider data is a tumultuous, tedious, and resource reliant endeavor. With data existing in conflicting formats and fragmented attributes, and across various applications across your organization and partners, how do you efficiently transform, cleanse, standardized, and reconcile provider data? For many healthcare organizations, provider data cleansing is like commanding a paper boat at the price of a luxury cruise ship.

The variations in formats, exchange, content, and intended use create a tsunami of costs related to internal resources, time-consuming workflows, and regulatory fines. This poses unnecessary obstacles for consumers. providers, health plans, and partners who need access to reliable provider information.

So how do you chart a better course?

Benchmark data accuracy

Before starting your data cleansing voyage, it is important to benchmark the current state of your provider information. Begin by creating a data repository that collects and maps data elements. Use a smart analytics solution that can identify and score your provider network data to pinpoint inconsistencies, duplicates, and errors.

Find an expert provider data profiler

With no industry-standard format requirement, provider data discrepancy detection becomes difficult. An AI-enabled data profiling process can automate the identification of metadata and provide visibility and data matching right down to the single attribute level. Artificial Intelligence helps to pinpoint inconsistencies to assure comprehensive data cleansing. It optimizes the cleansing process by mapping data from source to transformation and finally to destination using commonly used formats

​Check. Cleanse. Check again.

Your cleansing workflow should include quality checks of the information flow to monitor and correct errors that may occur during processing. Data integrity can be ensured with AI-powered data transformation, scrubbing, validation, and transport. A final check and scoring of your data help you establish a higher benchmark for accuracy moving forward.

Don't go it alone.

Provider data is a critical part of your business, so it is important to find a partner that really knows the industry to control costs and manage the challenges you face. A trusted provider data expert can more efficiently and effectively take on the workload, helping you reduce costs and free up internal resources to focus on other areas of your business.

The goal is to reduce costs by automating workflow to continuously clean enterprise data that can be accessed for consumer searches, integration, reporting, and analyses across your organization and regulatory environment.