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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.
Justify Before you Buy - Part 2
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.
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?
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, 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.
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?
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
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.
Clinical Labs: Meeting the needs of providers is a juggling act
The ultimate juggling act: clinical labs in a hospital setting are required to maintain the highest operational standards. They complete their own inpatient testing while managing the logistics of send-outs and the returning results from reference and specialty labs. No matter where it’s coming from, comprehensive data needs to get back to the ordering physician - data required to make the best care decisions.
Interoperability, yes, but with truly accurate data
Keeping up with Transplant Patient Re-verification
A pressing issue in transplantation today is appropriate organ allocation and ensuring that the sickest patients and those who would benefit the most are afforded the gift of life. In order to be listed, all patients require certain specific data points in order to be successfully entered into the national database and deemed active on the waitlist. For some patients, such as those awaiting a lung or liver transplant, organ allocation is driven by scoring systems (the LAS and MELD score respectively) that are a reflection of disease severity.
