Improved physician mapping with address verification

PurpleLab is a health tech company dedicated to helping clients in the following industries: clinical research, Health Economics and Outcome Research (HEOR), commercial pharmaceuticals, and commercial medical devices. HealthNexus™, the company’s no-code analytics platform, “empowers life sciences, payers, providers, and other stakeholders with real-world evidence to solve conventional and emerging challenges faster and more cost-effectively.”

Michael Hoey, Chief Technology Officer at PurpleLab, described their problem.

“We were getting a lot of noisy address data in many of our data feeds. Doctor and practice data have significantly evolved over the years. A doctor used to have one office where they worked from 8 to 6 every day. Now, most doctors probably have 3 different consistent work locations.”

Varying hospital privileges, nonprofit work, telemedicine practices, their own brick-and-mortar facilities, clinical trials, and many more locations listed under the same doctor led to duplicate and alias information in their datasets. Even finding the address where any physician worked was difficult. This caused problems for users who were searching for a local professional. Still, the address information was often unverified, only a part-time location, or completely wrong altogether.

“There are literally over 2 million medical facilities that are tracked by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in the United States,” says Michael, explaining that these facilities are updated and managed by their staff or client input. “Something as simple as knowing a doctor’s exact name and knowing where they’re located winds up being pretty hard to do and pretty noisy in terms of deciphering the truest source.”

PurpleLab also had to deal with secondary addresses within a single structure, especially while working with hospitals. Michael explained that approximately 10 different unique addresses would show up for hospitals or larger buildings containing multiple suites, simply because the place of delivery for USPS differed.

Many of PurpleLab’s clients are dependent on having accurate medical provider information, so when looking for a solution, the extra data points that come along with US Address Verification, which help identify where physicians are predominantly practicing, were important for PurpleLab. KPIs for choosing Smarty:

Since implementing Smarty solutions to their noisy address data problems, PurpleLab has achieved better accuracy. Smarty's validation helped PurpleLab reach an accuracy standard that, before, seemed unreachable due to alias addresses, duplicate records, and even typos. Using Smarty products helped to reduce the noise and find the right match for providers and offices in the US.

Address verification not only provided PurpleLab with standardized and verified addresses, but since US Address Verification also returns up to 55 points of data with every address validation result, PurpleLab was able to make sense of messy data and further detect which doctors and healthcare providers were linked to which addresses, providing clarity to a messy situation.

The best part? Smarty’s user-friendly interface offered great automation, so PurpleLab could return to doing what they do best. Supportive SDK and other documentation were used to integrate the product into their existing data cleansing pipelines, even without prior coding experience. PurpleLab uses our REST interface the most. Michael even mentioned, “Although your support team is friendly, we’re happy to report that we didn’t ever really need them.”