The 2017 AHIMA Convention and Exhibit came and went last week. The diverse crowd of junior and senior members of the HIM community coming together is inspiring to see. Spending time sharing ideas and best practices and as the slogan goes, “to inspire, innovate, and lead!”
The challenges of the HIM community are growing.
Healthcare organizations are merging to achieve a better quality of care and cost efficiency. They are asking HIM departments to handle a wider variety of documents and information from disparate sources. The EMR (electronic medical record) is becoming more “complicated.” It's no longer the electronic version of a paper folder but requires information to be filed with more detail. This includes orders, procedures, encounters, and visits.
Finally, the value of external information has increased and is often required to have a complete patient record. This record tells physicians the whole patient story. It allows your organization to provide quality measures for MIPS (Merit-based incentive payment system) and other compliance requirements.
These challenges present the opportunity to re-assess how new processes and technologies can help.
The AHIMA conference provides collaboration and discussion of healthcare innovations. As a vendor in the exhibition hall, many people stopped by to understand what our technology could do to help with their challenges. Sometimes our solution was the right fit and sometimes it was not. Attendees had excitement in discovering what the possibilities were for their organizations.
We hope that the spirit of AHIMA stays alive in the weeks and months to come. We also hope the HIM community continues to question whether there are better ways to solve current challenges.
Does technology exist that can help you do things better, faster and with more accuracy?
Have you reassessed all the options to understand what may have changed in the last few years?
Our software can automate manual indexing and filing of documents to correct places in the EMR. It can capture patient demographics from internal and external documents, and match to patients in the EMR. It can capture dates of service and detailed clinical results and ready them for filing along with the original documents. Applying our technology to the many new challenges you face in the ever-evolving world of healthcare is one example of how you could make your department more efficient while achieving better accuracy and consistency.
Keep the spirit of AHIMA alive and assess ours or other vendors’ technologies on a regular basis. We will make the assessment process easy and efficient and it will allow you to understand your options and to consider what is best for your organization.
About the Author: Ellen Bzomowski
With 20 years of experience in data capture and voice recognition, Ellen’s experience has focused on achieving higher efficiency and automation in getting data where it will be most useful to an organization. At Extract Systems, she continues to focus on the same ideas and works to get the word out about how Extract Systems’ advanced data capture and redaction solutions make more data valuable and accessible, while securing anything that is private. She holds an MBA from Northeastern University and lives and works in Boston.