If you're going to Phoenix, remember to pack your labs

If you're going to Phoenix, remember to pack your labs

So, you're thinking of migrating to Epic's solid organ transplant module Phoenix? Or did you recently switch? The Phoenix product has come a long way since its initial release around 10 years ago. It is a great way to effectively manage your transplant population within the fully-integrated Epic suite of products. I helped to support the first 40 or so Phoenix go-lives during my Epic tenure and take great pride in the application.

How to Solve One Precision Medicine Obstacle

How to Solve One Precision Medicine Obstacle

The move towards precision medicine is gaining more traction though the project faces limitations. One area that we can anticipate will be influenced by precision medicine programs as healthcare IT technologies continue to spread in the healthcare market is in EMR/EHR solution integration and functionality.

The Value of Closing the Loop with CPOE

The Value of Closing the Loop with CPOE

If you are in healthcare, then you likely know what CPOE is.  In case the acronym is not familiar to you, computerized physician order entry (CPOE) is a process of electronic entry of medical practitioner instructions for the treatment of patients (particularly hospitalized patients) under his or her care.

Big Data in Oncology

Big Data in Oncology

Big Data and cancer has been a hot topic for a few years and for good reason. Effectively diagnosing and treating patients as efficiently as possible could be a matter of life and death. Ensuring accurate data is accessible is a critical piece in cancer care...

How to Optimize Epic EMR Workflows and External Lab Entry

How to Optimize Epic EMR Workflows and External Lab Entry

As you likely know by now, Extract’s document handling platform can save your users time, improve accuracy, increase EMR adoption, and improve patient care. But what you may not know, is that with a few tweaks of your EMR build and workflows, Extract’s data extraction software can become even more efficient and effective.

How to Get Complete and Accurate Data in the EHR

How to Get Complete and Accurate Data in the EHR

Having access to quality data in the EHR is paramount when using the data for decision making. If clinicians have to search through the media/documents tab in the EMR or they have faxes stuck in the system, staff does not have up-to-date information to use for the decision making process. This could potentially put a patient’s safety at risk and greatly delay the treatment process. 

Electronic Health Records Will Help Customize Medical Treatments

Electronic Health Records Will Help Customize Medical Treatments

In a recent topic covered by NPR in Health News, titled Electronic Health Records May Help Customize Medical Treatments, expresses how healthcare is continuously uncovering the benefit of population health and the potential for a database of medical records to be mined in order to help shape an individual’s treatment.

Can Medical Record Abstraction Be Automated?

Can Medical Record Abstraction Be Automated?

Ahhh, the age old question.  Can (or should) tasks that humans can do very well, but perhaps not very efficiently, be automated with technology?  While the views on this topic would vary greatly from an abstraction service provider to a low-budget medical research project manager, there are perhaps a few things that could be defined to help one decide what is best for their particular medical record abstraction situation.  Consider these ideas:

Cures Act May be the Data Cure

Cures Act May be the Data Cure

The 21st Century Cures Act was officially signed on Tuesday, December 13th. It is another significant medical research appropriation bill it is optimistically another giant step toward reduced regulation and faster development and delivery of new medicine and medical devices. As exciting as that is, this bill also directs HHS and the National Director for Health Information Technology to make EHR’s interoperable.

Doing the Paper Shuffle

Doing the Paper Shuffle

The year is now 2017 and we have been a digital society for quite some time, but if you talk with people in the healthcare industry, you will find that paper is still floating around. In 2016, we worked with two major hospitals and you would be amazed by not only how prevalent paper documents are, but how these paper medical documents get copied and moved to different people through the hospital, this is what we call the “Paper Shuffle”. 

The 7 Million Dollar Clinical Data Problem

The 7 Million Dollar Clinical Data Problem

Your clinical staff must refer to paper, faxed, and/or scanned documents because clinical data found within these documents are not found in the EHR. Your interruptions to the workflow, that was carefully designed into the EHR, costs time, money, and frustration and it may even insert errors into the healthcare decision making process.

What Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwiches and Document Handling Have in Common

What Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwiches and Document Handling Have in Common

 Every good process has a starting point. In the instance of making the perfect Peanut butter and Jelly sandwich, “first you take the peanuts and you crush ‘em, you crush ‘em” (view entire peanut butter and jelly sandwich process here. Whereas, the first step of a healthcare data entry process, is document handling. First you take the paper documents, and you sort ‘em, you sort ‘em. Then you take the documents and you scan ‘em, you scan em...

The Trump Wild Card

The Trump Wild Card

I have recently talked with a few healthcare executives. They, like everyone else I know, are careful about what they say about the effect a Trump presidency will have on healthcare. This could be that they are being politically correct but it’s possible they don’t know what Trump is actually going to do. It is clear Trump’s pre-election rhetoric has softened in many areas. Only time will tell what his real intentions are.

Discovering the Cure for Non-Interfaced Lab Results

Discovering the Cure for Non-Interfaced Lab Results

Aurora sought a way to pull paper results into their lab interface in order to eliminate paper-based results completely while removing the slow and laborious, manual data-entry process. At first, Aurora scanned documents into the EMR, requiring providers to open up scanned documents to view results; but what providers really wanted was to have discrete, trendable lab results in one central location.