Extract is on your critical path toward HIMSS Stage 7

Recent conversations with HIM folks have lead me to take a closer look at the requirements for Stage 7.  We want to be on the critical path helping to achieve the highest healthcare standards and as it turns out, we are on that path.

Here is the Stage 7 requirement.   

The hospital no longer uses paper charts to deliver and manage patient care. They have a mixture of discrete data, document images, and medical images within their EMR environment. Data warehousing is being used to analyze patterns of clinical data to improve quality of care, patient safety, and care delivery efficiency. Clinical information can be readily shared via standardized electronic transactions (i.e., CCD) with all entities that are authorized to treat the patient, or a health information exchange (i.e., other non-associated hospitals, outpatient clinics, sub-acute environments, employers, payers and patients in a data sharing environment). The hospital demonstrates summary data continuity for all hospital services (e.g., inpatient, outpatient, ED, and with any owned or managed outpatient clinics). Blood products and human milk are included in the closed-loop medication administration process.

Many of these requirements can be directly dealt with inside Extract’s automated document and data handling platform. 

Automated handling of incoming external documents is on the critical path leading to HIMSS Stage 7.

The hospital no longer uses paper charts to deliver and manage patient care and has a mixture of discrete data, document images, and medical images within its EMR environment.  Positioning Extract at the front door (for all incoming external documents) means that documents and data (faxes/paper/images) will immediately begin a quick and automated process of being absorbed into the EMR and other downstream systems like the document management system (DMS) or laboratory information system (LIS).  Immediately upon receipt of the document, Extract will read it and determine what kind of document it is.  The first differentiator is whether the document is a clinical or nonclinical document but more importantly, the software will determine whether the document is a lab test result, discharge summary or an explanation of benefits or a hundred or two hundred or even more different document types.  If the document is to be stored as an image, Extract can capture the index data and speed the image and index to the downstream system.  If it is a laboratory test result, Extract can parse the important discrete data on the lab document and send both the discrete data and the image to the EMR or to the LIS or to both.  Staff, called verifiers, oversee the process rather than data entry staff who have historically made all of the decisions and enter all of the data.  Verifiers only deal with exceptions.

Data warehousing is being used to analyze patterns of clinical data to improve quality of care, patient safety, and care delivery efficiency.  It matters little whether this requirement is focused on the individual patient or a population of patients because Extract’s forte is to deliver discrete data. A major national cancer center uses Extract’s technology to populate a cancer research database while other customers populate the individual patient’s record.  They published a rigorous paper about their research efforts and they included an excellent description of Extract’s critical role in finding and delivering important data to the repository.

Clinical information can be readily shared via standardized electronic transactions (i.e., CCD) with all entities that are authorized to treat the patient, or a health information exchange (i.e., other non-associated hospitals, outpatient clinics, sub-acute environments, employers, payers and patients in a data sharing environment).  Clinical data can only be shared electronically if the critical discrete data found in the incoming external documents is delivered and found in the EMR.   As described above, Extract automates the document and data delivery workflow at a much reduced cost, with fewer errors and in less time.

The above description of Extract’s capabilities only describes document classification data capture and routing.  Over the years and after hundreds of customer installations, Extract has created other important capabilities that truly make Extract’s software a critical feature in our customer’s environment. 

The following important features solve difficult problems:

• Duplicate document handling (especially important for laboratory test results) identifies and allows easy decision making

• Multi-page / multi-patient documents can automatically be recast into separate patient delineated documents auto pagination

• Full text document search for any information found on any document while it is within Extract’s platform

• Error detection and institutionalized QA processes allow management to react problems in the workflow

• Management reports can be set up and delivered on a schedule to provide hard data on the inner workings of the workflow

To learn more about how Extract has helped other healthcare organizations on their quest to organization and automation of workflows, visit the page below.