Transplant is Joining the Jet Age. Will test results be able to keep up?

Transplant is Joining the Jet Age. Will test results be able to keep up?

In an article in Forbes business magazine today, Peter Ubel, begins to investigate the question of whether or not we should be striving for a world in which all transplant candidates should have access to LearJets so that they can place themselves on multiple waiting lists and have a greater chance of reaching the top of that list in time?  No matter how you feel personally or professionally about this issue, an important point that he raises in the world of transplant is this: as technology (planes, drugs, etc.) improves and allows for greater possibilities of organs for a greater pool of candidates, how can we be sure that waitlists are always accurate and up to date.

Health Information Exchange – A Personal Tale

Health Information Exchange – A Personal Tale

Recently, I had the misfortune of sustaining an injury while running.  Due to the nature of my injury I visited a total of five providers in the span of one week. The events that unfolded provided the perfect opportunity to reflect on the state of health information interoperability six years after the passing of the HITECH Act.

Justify Before you Buy - Part 2

Justify Before you Buy - Part 2

Part Two: it’s time to go ask for permission (budget) to purchase this solution.

Justify Before you Buy - Part 1

Justify Before you Buy - Part 1

Your department is overwhelmed with data entry. Incoming faxes with lab results and other clinical data swamp your staff. You are beginning to worry about quality of care and data entry errors. Your staff is wondering if they are here to help patients or to improve their typing skills. 

Outreach Workshop Part 2: Setting up Remote Facilities

Outreach Workshop Part 2: Setting up Remote Facilities

As we discussed in our first outreach blog, step one is to establish a relationship with a provider or a network of providers through education or other interactions.  Once you’ve created this relationship, you will want to capitalize on the potential additional volume for your program and institution, as well as be able to continue to provide the outstanding service your program is known for.  In order to do this, you must be able to make working with you seamless and easy, without increasing the actual or perceived burden to the organization’s patients. 

Outreach Workshop Part 1: The Big Picture

Outreach Workshop Part 1: The Big Picture

In our next series of blogs, we will discuss the concept of outreach and how programs can use it to improve not only their volumes, but also their outcomes. Outreach can be simplistically defined as the act of reaching out to a group.  It may also be defined as a systematic attempt to provide services beyond conventional limits to a particular segment of the community. In this blog, we will concentrate on the former definition, namely, reaching out to different groups to grow our program.

Assessing Risk of Clinical Data Capture Workflows

Assessing Risk of Clinical Data Capture Workflows

The HITECH Act and Meaningful Use requirements have ushered in a new era of health information management that promises to deliver better care quality, greater efficiency and at a lower cost.  It’s also putting more pressure on staff to get clinical data into the EHR data fields.  As a result, already strained resources are being strained even more.  The health data integration dilemma is especially acute when dealing with external data sources, such as clinical labs that often arrive by fax or are made available via portals.

What is your staff really doing?

What is your staff really doing?

When asked to evaluate workflow processes in transplant programs, we often here from hospital administrators that their transplant program is over-resourced and they do not understand why work-up time is so long, why patients complain that it takes so long to get a phone call returned or why the physicians always ask for more staff. " Do you know what your transplant staff is truly doing?", is usually the next question we ask. Not to our surprise, the answer is "of course".

Tracking Data is a Key Component of QAPI Programs

Tracking Data is a Key Component of QAPI Programs

Tracking Data is a Key Component of QAPI Programs, not only for CMS but also now with UNOS 

One of the most challenging aspects of transplant program management is ensuring that your Quality Assessment and Process Improvement programs are measuring meaningful and actionable items that lead to program improvement. There are many factors that contribute to these projects but one thing in common is that they are all data-driven.

The Needles in the Haystack – Case Finding Tools

The Needles in the Haystack – Case Finding Tools

Case finding is a never-ending cycle of review and follow up. It’s an enormous manual effort to abstract data from patient files to populate hospital, central, state or the National cancer database to complete the case entry; as well as checking on the status of cases in suspense and quality control that binds it all together. Though I’m not a certified registrar myself, I definitely get the impression from those that I have spoken with that they continue to be fiercely devoted to the important work they do; and are steadfast in getting it right.

Incorporating Continuation of Care Documents into your EHR

Incorporating Continuation of Care Documents into your EHR

When you hear people talk about a Continuity of Care Document (CCD), funny enough, it’s actually usually a “document”. In reality, the specification for a CCD, according to Wikipedia, is “an XML-based markup standard intended to specify the encoding, structure, and semantics of a patient summary clinical document for exchange.” CCDs are important to patient’s treatment, but its original intention of being a way for pertinent patient information to be transferred one system to another has not yet been realized. So, when patients are referred to another physician or if CCDs are trying to be used to convert massive amounts of data from one EHR to a new EHR, the exchange of information is often not seamless.

Does your new EHR mean more data entry?

Does your new EHR mean more data entry?

Transplant care teams have enough challenges managing patient information arriving from outside their institution. It's already a full workload entering primary data from the transplant evaluation process. It's a never ending process of data entry for solid organ programs. EHR adoption is adding to that already heavy workload and is creating the need to enter more discrete data. Ask yourself: isn't it enough that your solid organ transplant teams sift through a large number of non-electronic patient details from their originating healthcare institution?

Automated and Standardized Data Entry

Automated and Standardized Data Entry

If you had electronic tools to automate data entry, capture the valuable data that is currently coming to you in electronic and paper documents, and use it immediately to make essential clinical decisions, would you ever go back to the entering data the old way?  

PHI in Medical Research

PHI in Medical Research

There’s been a lot of news lately about the 2015 NIH budget being flat, worrying researchers that the funding pinch will have a significant impact on current and future projects. Even Nobel prize winning researcher Craig Mello from the University of Massachusetts Medical School recently commented on the impact this could have on his ongoing work, noting that if he couldn’t get a grant he’s applied for he may have to reduce staff.

Transplant Program Staffing

Transplant Program Staffing

As we assist various programs around the country, one of the things we are asked is how does a program balance staffing constraints while accomplishing the many administrative and clerical tasks that are required and still deliver high quality patient care. Frequently when addressing staffing situations, what we find is that programs may have sufficient staff but everyone is doing so many other tasks that it detracts from their true function. Other times, we find that the program is simply understaffed for the volume or number of patients that they are caring for. While the scenarios seem to be different and one would think require different solutions, an assessment of staffing needs begins with an understanding of each role and what tasks that role is actually required to do (not just what we think they are doing). Once the tasks are defined, an understanding of the work flow processes and the current operational chains that each task requires is needed.