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.
I can guarantee that anybody reading this blog uses machine learning dozens of times each day without even realizing it. When you perform a web, search using Google or Bing, for instance, the search engine works so well because their software has figured out how to predict searches and rank pages for you.
It is a way for healthcare organizations to prove that their patients are their number one priority. By proving the quality of compliance, organizations can prove that year over year their quality in care is constantly improving. By being able to prove compliance is important within an organization, there is a direct correlation to better patient satisfaction, more patients, better opportunities for successful outreach, and staying in business.
The Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) has been in place for over 4 months now. It consolidated and improved Meaningful Use, PQRS, and VBPM and added some new Improvement Activities to your to-do list. By all accounts, it's a better system that will hopefully improve the healthcare we receive across the nation. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been a lot of work!
Googling the phrase “Clinical Data Capture” leads to an entire page of results dedicated to “Electronic Data Capture” for clinical trials. There is a vast number of articles and vendors that suggest they cover the existing challenges, technologies and innovations happening this area. But is this really true?
Most people don’t realize how heavily some industries rely on faxes. But to those of us in the know, it’s becoming cliché to mention how relevant faxing still is. With non-relenting fax volumes comes the need for businesses to hire people who can manage incoming documents. Document handling is an intense job that requires an immense amount of focus and attention to detail.
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.
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.
Yesterday, the prestigious Institute of Medicine (IOM) announced a soon-to-be-released report highlighting diagnostic errors as a persistent “blind spot in the delivery of quality health care” and urges the healthcare industry to change in order to address the prevalence of diagnostic errors, which the IOM defines as “the failure to (a) establish an accurate and timely explanation of the patient’s health problem(s) or (b) communicate that explanation to the patient.”
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.
