Backlog of Faxed COVID Lab Results? Let Extract Systems help with LabDE

Forgive me for resurrecting this cliché cartoon, but it aptly illustrates what health systems are experiencing in this new COVID era.  More than ever, CIOs are looking to automate manual processes, move employees remote, and address the ever-changing guidelines for required COVID data points. (The
COVID-19 data issues 12 health system IT execs want addressed first)

Despite these initiatives, what seems apparent and unfortunate is that health systems are, understandably, in reaction mode. Rather than proactively tackling goals, they are challenged to address more immediate and changing COVID priorities. Ironically, with all the advancement in healthcare technology, systems still struggle with the iconic fax machine. Faxed COVID lab results have accentuated the fax machine as a weak link in otherwise sophisticated infrastructures.

Recently, Extract collaborated with a LabDE customer, a comprehensive health system in the Midwest, to help address a spike in manual abstraction and indexing related to faxed COVID results.  Like so many organizations across the US, (Bottleneck for U.S. Coronavirus Response: The Fax Machine), they couldn’t keep up with their existing staff and hiring more staff was out of the question.  So, based on their ongoing success and efficiency with Extract, this health system decided to direct the influx of faxed COVID results to our LabDE data extraction software for automated processing.

Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic took hold and began straining most aspects of our healthcare system, Extract Systems’ CEO, Dave Rasmussen, has been pursuing ways in which he and Extract could “do our part” to help support the healthcare industry in its struggle against the impact of COVID. He knows that our dynamic automation and extraction technology would be a valuable asset to health systems during this challenging time.

I’m proud to say that Extract collaborated successfully with this health system to “interface” their faxed COVID labs by auto-abstracting results while auto-indexing and routing the fax images, eliminating their backlog. Extract also did the software development and provided the required professional services to customize data mapping tables specific to COVID results, free of charge. Plus going forward, Extract will not charge to process their additional volume of COVID lab results.

Other struggles that have become apparent in processing faxed COVID results include varying data point requirements, data normalization, and handwriting. Extract addresses each of these:

• Varying Data Points Required: LabDE provides a customizable data entry panel so that if the required data points change, the user interface and mapping can be re-configured. Part of this process involves running samples through our OCR, NLP, and machine leaning to teach the software how to identify the new data points to extract.

• Data Normalization: LabDE provides a configurable bridging table (mapping) that will convert inconsistent, incoming result descriptions like “+” or “POS” to “Positive,” for example, so data is delivered into the EMR with the standard description the physicians and destination fields are expecting.

• Handwriting: Extract incorporates Google Cloud Vision to enhance its ability to identify, extract, and deliver the required data from lab results that include hand-written notes.

“Faxes” doesn’t have to be a dirty word. The end game is always to be paperless and faxless with 100% of the resulting laboratories interfaced; but as the 80/20 rule goes, getting that last 20% of disparate labs interfaced always proves to be cost prohibitive as the volumes from each individual site are too low to make economic sense.

Extract addresses that last 20% of non-interfaced documents by providing an “interoperability safety net.” By automatically intercepting faxes, then extracting and delivering discrete results to the EMR, LabDE is acting as an “interface” for the remaining resulting labs. The discrete faxed results are actionable faster for diagnosis, COVID modelling, metrics, contact tracing, etc., critical to reducing the impact of this virus.

If you’d like to learn more about how we do this, feel free to send me a note directly or use our contact form.