How to automate critical results reporting for priority patients

Critical results reporting or reporting lab results for priority patients from non-interfaced sources is no easy task. A delay in reporting can yield an unfortunate outcome for a patient whose condition is deteriorating. This is especially true for specialty departments that provide continued care for patients from far-flung locales, such as the transplant program. One transplant department receives thousands of these reports over a single patient's lifetime, and often hundreds of these documents for its patient population each day by fax.

Until now, critical results management solutions have ignored the chore of sifting through these unstructured documents to report results to the care team. Consequently, handling these results has stubbornly remained a manual, cumbersome and error-prone process.

Extract has developed a solution that not only automatically identifies lab reports for priority patients upon arrival. It also extracts and posts the data into the patient's EMR — a task that typically falls on the shoulders of thinly stretched staff. Furthermore, the Extract solution is able to prioritize these reports based on a patient's identity that the software automatically determines by 'reading' the document. It can also prioritize these results based on other customer-defined criteria such as order codes, test codes and test ranges.

Learn more about the Extract Systems solution to this health information management challenge and other challenges like it.


About the Author: Greg Gies

For 20 years in the software industry, Greg Gies has been helping businesses, government agencies and healthcare organizations achieve their goals and carry out their missions by making better use of information and automating business processes. Greg has held positions in sales, product management and marketing and holds an MBA from Babson College. He works and lives with his wife and three boys in the Boston area.