Why fragmented data creates downstream problems
Like messages shared in a game of telephone, clinical data can develop gaps and lose meaning as it moves across health systems, compromising the underlying intent. Hospitals struggle to communicate with specialists, specialists struggle to communicate with insurers, and so on.
Once patient data becomes fragmented, it often becomes unusable. As a result, technology applications not only need to exchange and access information securely – they need to understand it. Put simply, they must be interoperable.
The urgency of this matter is growing rapidly. In September, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced its plans to crack down on patient data blocking and penalize entities that fail to adopt Version 3 of the United States Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI) mandate, threatening CMS disincentives, termination of ONC certification, public disclosure, and more. This push is part of a broader federal effort to strengthen and safeguard the flow of health information nationwide, including initiatives like TEFCA and CMS-0057.
But keeping pace with evolving regulations while repairing incomplete, inconsistent, or “dirty” data is a costly, full-time job. One that slows decision-making and innovation, stifling growth. Redox, a leader in healthcare interoperability, recognized the need for a more proactive approach to health data exchange – one that didn’t involve reacting to problems downstream.
A proactive partnership for cleaner data
Through a renewed partnership between IMO Health and Redox, data can now be normalized and enriched in-flight before it ever reaches its destination. These capabilities are supported by Redox’s enhanced integration platform, Redox Engine, which features a flexible, modular architecture that lets organizations tailor interoperability workflows to their specific needs. Together, IMO Health and Redox enable organizations to extract key terms from unstructured narratives, standardize codes from diverse sources, and, when needed, write updated codes back to the original systems.
IMO Health plays a critical role in this process. Our pioneering terminology and data quality solutions help normalize clinical data across code sets, including ICD-10-CM, SNOMED CT®, LOINC, CPT®, and RxNorm®, ensuring that every data point is mapped to a standardized vocabulary. Our natural language processing (NLP) solution converts free-text narratives, such as physician notes and discharge summaries, into structured, searchable data.
Strengthening AI and analytics with upstream data enrichment
In an AI-driven era, the most valuable data is the kind you don’t have to fix later. When enrichment moves upstream, clinical data becomes more complete, usable, and ready to support AI models and other workflow tools without introducing errors. Teams also spend far less time manually cleaning up data when that enrichment occurs earlier in the process.
It’s not an overstatement to say that the partnership between IMO Health and Redox has the potential to enhance clinical data quality across the country. IMO Health’s comprehensive medical terminology fuels more than 4,500 U.S. hospitals, while Redox connects more than 12,000 healthcare organizations, ranging from providers to life sciences. Together, we’re encouraging hospitals, health tech teams, insurers, and others to rely on cleaner, more consistent data – and to use it to improve outcomes and propel the industry forward.
Interested in learning more about data standardization and NLP? Visit our solutions page for more information.
CPT is a registered trademark of the American Medical Association. All rights reserved.
RxNorm® is a registered trademark of the National Library of Medicine.
SNOMED and SNOMED CT are registered trademarks of SNOMED International.
