Health data challenges are a part of any healthcare organization. Frustration is a natural consequence. This is also a common topic in most healthcare press lately. It often feels like depending on which way the wind is blowing, the consensus is that EMR adoption by clinicians is either improving or getting worse. A recent KLAS report indicates adoption is improving across the globe. The decision to move to an enterprise EMR for most organizations often includes as a factor the goal of reducing the total number of applications supported. Initiatives to improve adoption then becomes a challenge if your department's prized application is removed for something "less than robust". Along with pain and frustration, keeping your clinicians happy is also a challenge. In the referenced KLAS article, the goal to use only integrated reference laboratories improved the happiness factor. However, when data was scanned and made available only as a tiff image, complaints such as "too many clicks”, soon followed. The phrases: "completely paperless” or "fully integrated" are often overstated; this might simply mean that send-outs or reference lab results are posted in your EHR as an image attachment or BLOB of text. Clinicians tend to stay away from EMR content in these formats. Context is often missing and takes too much time to locate. Let's say it takes 1+ minute to find and review the scanned image content. With an average of 25 patients per day, that's at least 30 minutes per day spent clicking for content.
Don’t worry, you can quickly become a hero for your clinicians by incorporating an intelligent data extraction solution. Intelligent data extraction automatically transforms faxed and scanned lab reports into standardized clinical data, integrating data directly in the patient record where your clinicians expect comprehensive health data to be found. Your clinicians will have more time to focus on your patients instead of searching and clicking for data trapped in images.
About the Author: Greg Gies
For 20 years in the software industry, Greg Gies has been helping businesses, government agencies and healthcare organizations achieve their goals and carry out their missions by making better use of information and automating business processes. Greg has held positions in sales, product management and marketing and holds an MBA from Babson College. He works and lives with his wife and three boys in the Boston area.