HealthyData Blog
In healthcare, there are so many regulations and technologies to stay current on. In our HealthyData blog, you will read everything from CMS meaningful use to EMR news, clinical best practices and QAPI program initiatives.
As I’m standing in line at my favorite coffee shop, I’m thinking about how baristas have perfected workflow; and now have improved perfection by allowing me to eliminate the line entirely by ordering in advance with my smart phone. It always excites me when I see a sequence of steps refined for optimum efficiency. I know it's odd, but I'm really strange like that.
Why do we have EMRs again? Were they meant to be electronic file folders? No, they are meant to hold discrete, structured data and add value by summarizing the most valuable data, giving us a more complete picture of a patient’s history, and allowing us to analyze and see trends in the data while automatically alerting us to data outside of allowed values.
In our first two blogs of this series, we discussed outreach programs beginning with education and facilitating improved patient care in the local community. What happens when the success of these efforts require a more frequent and sustained presence in the local medical community, particularly if the main facility is at a distance and precludes frequent visits by your team? In these cases, it may be beneficial to consider establishing your own brick and mortar facility to provide services to the patients on a routine basis.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
