Electronic Health Records Will Help Customize Medical Treatments
In a recent topic covered by NPR in Health News, titled Electronic Health Records May Help Customize Medical Treatments, author Richard Harris states how healthcare is continuously uncovering the benefits of population health and the potential for a database of medical records to be mined in order to help shape an individual’s treatment.
“Patients are always saying, don’t just give me the averages, tell me what happened to others who look like me and made the same treatment decisions I did,” says Dr. Tracy Lieu who leads Kaiser’s research division in Oakland, California. “And tell me not only did they live or die, but tell me what their quality of life was about.”
Gathering data from individual patients and storing that information in the EMR will individualize and optimize patient care. Collecting accurate data in quick and accurate fashion is more important than ever. Not only are we learning to compile a complete patient medical record for the patient’s care, but also for patients experiencing similar health patterns across the nation.
To have the ability to look at physical symptoms in medical records and the genetic variations that could be responsible in healthcare reveals the biology of chronic illnesses and can save lives. The biggest issue here is that the quality of data collected in medical records is not necessarily research quality.
The federal government is planning to recruit one million volunteers to expand its approach to research in its Precision Medicine Initiative, now known as the “All of Us” research program.
The most important step to precision medicine and population health is to make sure the data in lab results, referral packets and other medical documentation is in fact being imported into the EMR or EHR quickly and accurately. Data capture in healthcare has been debated as an obvious need in which most healthcare organizations don’t even realize the drastic impact negligent manual entry can impose on diagnostic decisions and the future health of each patient.
According to the American Clinical Laboratory Association, 7 billion lab tests per year inform 70% of diagnostic decisions concluding that more attention needs to be paid to the possibility that laboratory test results contribute to diagnostic errors that may lead to death — especially non-interfaced lab results received by fax that require human intervention to relay the results, match it to the patient and translate test names, unit measures and reference ranges.
Extract’s customers use advanced OCR technology to deliver standardized discrete test results data to the EMR where the physician wants them, very quickly and extremely accurately. Before discovering Extract, clients have experienced weeks (and sometimes months) of backlog results that have not been posted to the EMR. Clients have estimated their data entry error rates are between 2% and 5% before deploying the intelligent clinical data extraction solution. For more information on medical errors, check out Medical Errors are Causing Patient Deaths: Here’s How Extract is Saving Lives.
With Extract, clients eliminate the backlog of data waiting to be delivered to the EMR with a reduction in entry error by at least 90%. Furthermore, priority patient results are in the EMR within an hour.
