In January, Opala held its first hack-a-thon. Over four days, twenty-two Opala employees broke into small teams to tackle issues such as identifying patient cohorts for chronic conditions, machine learning using FHIR resources

And identifying underserved counties. At the end of the hack-a-thon, each team presented their results and judges voted on which was most successful. The winning group was Team Butterfly Wings, comprised of Michael Vincent, EMPI Specialists, Rhys Platt, QA Software Engineer, Ruth Berge, Data Engineer, and Simone Graham, HL7 Interface Engineer, with a project called “Identity Crisis”, focused on reducing the number of duplicate patients in our data. Lack of patient matching poses serious patient safety issues, especially in emergency situations when the patient’s records and complete clinical history are not readily available for providers. The process of manually matching patients to their records is expensive and burdensome for providers and health plans and significantly impacts a patient’s medical experience.

Team Butterfly Wings explored different functionality within Verato, a leading identity matching solution. The team looked at 10 test cases where a match was labeled “low confidence” and modified demographic information to replicate the issue. They discovered duplicate identities were created when a patient had a change in their address and insurance coverage at the same time.

The hack-a-thon showed the root cause of the issue and gave specific development ideas to solve real issues in our customers’ data sets. This was one scenario that was tested and solved in a short amount of time. The ability to socialize this set of problems helped our team understand the capabilities of our matching tools better, providing a better experience for our clients and their patients. We look forward to what is discovered at our next Hack-a-Thon

Congrats to Team Butterfly Wings!