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.
Healthcare regulations and processes continue to change. Tools that have been adopted and adapted throughout the evolution of healthcare technology include the EHR (electronic health record) and the EMR (electronic medical record). The EHR and EMR are complementary technologies, providing more benefit together than on their own.
In the medical field, if you are an organization that receives incoming faxes of documents, you could have dozens of different categories. However, if you are part of the organization that manages lab results, the most important documents are those lab results, then everything else. In a world consumed by managing documents, proper classification and routing is critical to controlling these lab results. CAP Today outlined the need for lab documents control in their article, Bedeviled by Documents, Labs Seek Control.
If Google can make a self-driving car why can’t external labs be automatically integrated (driven) into clinical information systems?
Recently while visiting a National Cancer Institute customer that is also a designated Comprehensive Cancer Center we had a brief chuckle regarding cutting edge technology and healthcare. Our customer, a large academic medical center, had asked us to come and talk with other departments about expanding our clinical data extraction software to other departments. They currently use Extract to capture data from lengthy pathology reports and then import the information into their data analytics repository.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
