One of the hardest problems in health IT is the effort to get data from different silos into a centralized database that can be searched as a single dataset. So, this is us announcing our new "linking and shrinking" technology, code named "Squirrel." What does it do?
Squirrel is a record-linkage and deflation system that pulls in data from multiple federal provider databases in various formats, makes them play nice together by linking everything up under providers' NPI numbers, preserves all the data but shrinks the file size down to about 9% of the original size, puts it in a format that can be managed in Microsoft Access or other garden variety database software, downloads it to our customers, and then does it all again fresh every month.
The technology is built on record-linkage methods developed over twenty years. Interesting trivia: The precursor to the current system was built in Microsoft Access 1.0 -- you remember it, the Introductory Package -- in 1992. While we don't share all the secrets, the basic trick involves pattern matching algorithms and a lot of processing time to handle more than 13 million rows of data, comparing each provider's records between all the sources. The end result is called CarePrecise Access.
We just sent out a press release about the whole thing.
Now you'll excuse us, as we have some more nuts to collect and crunch on.
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