Our leadership makes rounds every day to visit inpatients and I am wondering if there is some way that the software system that holds our inpatient demographics could be run through raisers edge for a comparison and the list of patients who are our current donors be flagged?   In other words, how do others identify if one of their donors is a current inpatient in their hospital other than going through the inpatient list one by one for comparison.

Lisa Stuckey

Administrative Assistant & Database Administrator

BroMenn Foundation

Lisa-

We're currently not allowed access to the daily census for our hospitals - our legal department has a particularly narrow interpretation of HIPAA's "dates of service" clause - if a patient doesn't have a start AND end date, we're not allowed to have their information yet. We continue to work with them to expand their interpretation.

In the mean time, we do monitor all hospital discharges for our hospitals for identification, qualification and post-encounter stewardship.

It is a bit complicated but works extremely well. The key for us is getting fuzzy matches between data files from our hospital systems and Raiser's Edge. We make liberal use of RODBA and a tool I'm a huge fan of called Match from DQ Global. I've posted about Match before - we use it for deduping and for finding matches between lists. It can do fuzzy matching for misspellings, name variations, addressing variations, etc.

In the wee hours of each morning, each of our hospital systems uploads HIPAA compliant patient information to an FTP server at our Foundation. I've got an automated process that imports those files into SQL tables, runs some address cleanup routines and then I have scripts that use DQ Global to match the patients against our Associate and Medical Staff lists (to suppress them for their privacy) and our HIPAA opt out list and then against Raiser's Edge. The patient records are flagged and then we use SQL Server Reporting Services to e-mail PDF reports to each of our major gift teams and our senior leadership. The reports are sequenced by whether someone has a Moves Manager assigned and then in descending order by lifetime giving.

It has more moving parts than I prefer but has actually been pretty close to bullet proof. It's been very well received by all of our staff. One of the ideas behind this was for it to be usable when we are eventually allowed to use it for patient census as well.

I'm not sure if this is helpful for you, but I'm happy to answer any questions you might have.

Mitch Gibbs
VP, Advancement Services
Advocate Charitable Foundation
mitchell.gibbs@advocatehealth.com

Thanks Mitch,

It does seem a bit complicated... but, hopefully this information will help my IS folks when I get ready to talk with them about this.

Thanks again,

Lisa

To those in a hospital setting, that have a grateful patient program.

We are looking for a softer name for our program, what other program names can you share in the place of "grateful patient"?

Zoe LaRocca

CMH Foundation