“The aim is to give healthcare providers immediate and reliable access to patient histories, including not only hospital visits but telehealth consultations…”

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Verato has launched a new patient records system and is offering it to healthcare providers at no cost through 2020.

Dubbed the ‘Telehealth Identity Bridge’, the solution is designed to link a given patient’s Electronic Health Records chart and telehealth history to a single Medical Record Number. The aim is to give healthcare providers immediate and reliable access to patient histories, including not only hospital visits but telehealth consultations, at a time when the latter are being widely embraced to facilitate the social distancing needed to fight COVID-19’s spread.

“Inadequate patient identity matching between telehealth and the electronic health record (EHR) can be detrimental, leaving many telehealth and in-patient clinicians without access to the full clinical histories. This makes it incredibly difficult to triage cases and make timely and informed decisions,” explained Verato CEO Mark LaRow in a statement announcing the solution. “Given the COVID-19 pandemic and the immense surge in telehealth use, this need is evermore critical to ensure the highest quality of care is provided across all settings.”

The solution’s launch comes about a year after Verato’s announcement of a partnership with Imprivata, a provider of biometric patient identification technology, though Verato made no mention of Imprivata’s palm vein scanning technology in announcing the Telehealth Identity Bridge.