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How Clinical Data Capture is Changing Healthcare Forever

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How Clinical Data Capture is Changing Healthcare Forever

Abstraction is the process of reviewing large or small data sets or documents for information that will be needed in the future for decision making. The crux of the problem is having domain knowledge that allows one to accurately and swiftly sift through the important from the unimportant. When completed in accurate fashion, the result of data abstraction is the compression of a large amount of information to its essence without loss of meaning or usefulness. Abstraction is used to manage complexity so that great decisions can be made quickly and with confidence.

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5 Ways to Master Your Epic EMR

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5 Ways to Master Your Epic EMR

I worked at Epic for 12 years and I'm a big fan of what they do to innovate their products to meet the needs of clinicians. However, no matter how good the Epic EMR software is, implementing an infinitely complex piece of software in an infinitely complex industry brings with it many short-comings.

A few that I saw the most during my tenure at Epic were:

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How can healthcare benefit from OCR?

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How can healthcare benefit from OCR?

Can you benefit from OCR?

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is powerful software that transforms images such as faxes and scanned documents into human readable text. Access to this text is very powerful and can be used for many purposes. The questions below will help you determine whether or not you could benefit from an OCR solution.

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The Ongoing Threat of a HIPAA Breach

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The Ongoing Threat of a HIPAA Breach

It couldn’t happen to us.

I doubt anyone still feels that a HIPAA breach is impossible in their organization.  Results speak louder than words. 

A quick search reveals that every year there is a large number of breaches in the US.  There is no doubt these organizations know the threat of HIPAA breaches have taken some number of steps to protect against a breach but there is always more that could have been done to reduce/eliminate the exposure. 

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The HIPAA Compliance Balancing Act

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The HIPAA Compliance Balancing Act

I was just listening to a webinar by a reputable Health IT vendor the other day on visual security and privacy risks in healthcare.  As my company offers many ways to help with the challenges that healthcare organizations face with keeping PHI protected, I was interested in hearing what another solutions provider had to say. 

I was rather surprised when the speaker mentioned keeping faxes and print outs further behind the counter so that others cannot easily see or take them. 

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5 Tips to Boost Productivity in the Lab

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5 Tips to Boost Productivity in the Lab

Let’s be honest. We could all use an extra hour in the day. Or two… or three… or even just 30 minutes!

In working with labs we have found one of the biggest pain points is the inability to find the time to scan or fax in lab results and manually enter the data into the EMR. This is an enormous issue, considering if these results aren’t entered into the EMR quickly and accurately, someone’s life could be in harm’s way.

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Are You Compromising Your Clinical Data Management Quality?

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Are You Compromising Your Clinical Data Management Quality?

Have you been involved with clinical data management (CDM)?

If so, you know that following a defined and consistent process will lead to statistically sound data from clinical trials—every hospital’s dream. Part of that process may involve converting unstructured data into structured data which generally includes...

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HIPAA Violations: Stay Out of the Spotlight

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HIPAA Violations: Stay Out of the Spotlight

When it comes to security and PHI for hospitals, it’s best to keep out of the news headlines…

In talking with our healthcare partners these days, a lot of our conversations tend to move toward security, and more specifically, securing PHI. With the recent cyber-attacks on healthcare organizations making headlines and resulting in complete shutdowns of hospital IT systems, you can understand how this is a priority.

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What's Better for your Hospital, Manual or Automatic?

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What's Better for your Hospital, Manual or Automatic?

No, this isn’t an article about buying cars.  Although it may sound like it, I'm actually talking about clinical extraction software.  There are some striking parallels when comparing car purchases and data extraction software purchases.

Aside from the fact that modern cars are essentially computers on wheels—on average containing thirty computers and millions of lines of code—buying a car is similar to the purchasing process of choosing an extraction software in a more practical way.  

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How Bad Data Hurts Quality Improvement in Healthcare

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How Bad Data Hurts Quality Improvement in Healthcare

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services defines Quality Improvement (QI) as systematic and continuous actions that lead to measurable improvement in health care services and the health status of targeted patient groups.

While procedures and systems are necessary to ensure continuity, equally important is the measurement of actions and patient health status, which require data not only to establish a baseline but also to continuously track, monitor and measure progress toward QI goals.

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Prevent PHI from Falling into the Wrong Hands

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Prevent PHI from Falling into the Wrong Hands

They are systematically gathering data about all of us.  No bit of data is too small because it could be a critical piece of the puzzle that connects all of the seemingly unimportant information they’ve already collected on you.  Imagine creating a digital picture of you, one pixel at a time.  Get it?  No wait, they’ve got it.

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What Makes an Effective QAPI Program: Part 6

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What Makes an Effective QAPI Program: Part 6

How do your objective measures and process improvement plans fit together in your Quality Assessment and Process Improvement Program (QAPI)?  Are they all individual efforts, kept in binders and not communicated to the various stakeholders? Or is your QAPI program a vibrant living entity in which all stakeholders are actively engaged?  One of the key items that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services looks for is a clear, cohesive and implemented plan that is reflected in your QAPI policy and it is a lack of this that is frequently cited as a deficiency during a CMS audit.  

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We Just Need to Get Those Darn Labs Entered!

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We Just Need to Get Those Darn Labs Entered!

"We just need to get those darn labs entered!"

I had an interesting conversation with a transplant director at the UNOS Transplant Management Forum. She said, "we have a great transplant management system, now we just need to get those darn labs entered!"

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What Makes an Effective QAPI Program? Part 5

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What Makes an Effective QAPI Program? Part 5

Once you have established and tracked your objective measures and have determined that an improvement project is in order, you need to make a decision as to which of the available methods and tools that you will use to perform your project. While the tendency will be to rush to begin the project, keep calm and chose the right tool for the right job.