Extract’s company meetings are often filled with the minutiae of our day to day operations. We discuss how we’re writing better rules to improve capture rates, new regulations that might affect redaction requirements, tradeshows we think we should attend, and how best to convey our value proposition to our prospects.
We’ve talked about it in our outreach to prospects before, but what happens a few times a year is that we have a frank discussion about the positive impact the effort we’re putting into our work is having. We talk throughout the room about our ability to access public records, the family members who are undergoing cancer treatments, the discharges from children’s hospitals; the fact that these are our customers and these are the people we can impact in a positive way.
It seems inherent that we’re improving things for the organizations we work with. On the government side, new regulations and forward-thinking county officials bring about redaction projects, but often without the extra staff needed to complete the work while normal operations continue. With these customers, we’re able to get their goals accomplished without hiring extra staff or incurring a huge expense.
For healthcare customers, the paper doesn’t stop. We’ve talked about it extensively in our HealthyData Blog, but people are often surprised by the amount of medical information that comes in by fax, even during a public health crisis. When we work with hospitals, we’re trying to make it so the organization can make best use of their employees. The Health Information Management department can be difficult to keep fully staffed and clinicians can even be roped into tasks like affixing barcode labels. For these groups, we drastically speed up their data entry and document intake processes so their well-trained employees can focus on more important tasks.
Both of these scenarios though, are looking at the direct impact of our software and services, rather than the bigger picture. It’s how business to business companies are trained to express the value of their product. Make no mistake, we focus on the business aspects of our product and the rate of return you’ll see with our software because there is one and it happens fast.
It can be easy to lose sight of the less tangible benefits of what we’re doing though, the ones that make a difference to people like our families in cancer centers. When we talk about our mission, we talk about facilitating open government and improving patient care. Throughout my years at Extract, I’ve learned that it comes down to speed and accuracy.
Errors are a big problem in medical records. They can lead to delays or drops in patient care. A lot of the health systems we talk with aren’t sure of their error rates, because they’re not being tracked. They only really show up when the error becomes an issue, often too late for anything meaningful to be done. An error could be an incorrect test result, it could be a test being assigned to the wrong patient, or it could stem from conflicting near duplicate documents.
When we configure features like patient and orders matching, it’s great to see the workflow change for a customer hoping to achieve a HIMSS 7 designation. It’s more important to know that when an out of town family travels to the children’s hospital, that the faxed, scanned, emailed, or carried on paper medical information will be in the right place, regardless of whether or not the paper is in a format anyone has seen before. It won’t be an image file that a clinician needs to find amongst other .pdfs and then read closely to find the relevant data. It will just be the accurate data, ready to go in the medical record.
It sounds simple enough, but it’s a good thing to remind ourselves of, particularly as we reflect on the close of the year. We couldn’t be more thankful for the clients that have allowed us to fulfill our mission, for the great and collaborative working relationships we have with them, and for the positive impact they have on our society.
About the Author: Chris Mack
Chris is a Marketing Manager at Extract with experience in product development, data analysis, and both traditional and digital marketing. Chris received his bachelor’s degree in English from Bucknell University and has an MBA from the University of Notre Dame. A passionate marketer, Chris strives to make complex ideas more accessible to those around him in a compelling way.