How to Solve One Precision Medicine Obstacle

You can match a blood transfusion to a blood type – that was an important discovery. What if matching a cancer cure to our genetic code was just as easy, just as standard? What if figuring out the right dose of medicine was as simple as taking our temperature?
— President Obama, January 30, 2015

The move towards precision medicine is gaining more traction though the project faces limitations. One area that we can anticipate will be influenced by precision medicine programs as healthcare IT technologies continue to spread in the healthcare market is in EMR/EHR solution integration and functionality.

In the 2016 Essential Brief: Precision Medicine Study, more than 60% of respondents indicated that their most significant challenge when conducting precision medicine, is clinical data systems integration and the integration of clinical and genomic data. The demand for clinical and genomic data with system integration underscores the need for additional EHR integration and functionality.

“The need for clinical data integration between precision medicine data/solutions and the patient record will be essential in the future. As the move toward population health grows and access to patient genomic data becomes more essential, EHR solutions will need the ability to harness that data for the holistic patient record and incorporate it into the clinician workflow.” Four Ways Precision Medicine Will Impact the Healthcare IT Solutions Market

One way that Extract can assist in making the EMR/EHR the most useful tool for precision medicine is to automatically route all external data into the EMR/EHR for trending and reporting. Capturing this data from scanned documents that most often are simply attached to the patient record in the EMR will provide results displayed as discrete information in the EMR. Extract’s deduplication tool is also helpful when reviewing results and pulling redundant results or reports that are already in the EMR to eliminate the confusion this may cause.

The 2015 Precision Medicine Initiative’s mission is to enable a new era of medicine through research, technology, and policies that empower patients, researchers and providers to work toward development of individualized care. In the blog Precision Medicine is Coming, Are Your Records Ready?, we discuss the obstacle of securing discrete pathology and genomic data stuck in narrative reports within unstructured formats. Manual extraction is extremely time consuming, costly in labor, and provides a high possibility of errors in data from human error.

Working with a reputable cancer center, Extract provides a computer-assisted data capture workflow. Pathology reports are pre-processed with intelligent data extraction software that “reads” reports and automatically identifies desired data elements. This data is “found” and organized into over 400 discrete fields and standardized. The only hands-on, optional step is to visually inspect using a verification screen with pre-validation to approve and output data to the data warehouse. This system has saved a huge amount of time and effort while assuring quality, accurate data.

It is our hope that with Extract’s intelligent data capture solution, clinical analytics adoption and sophistication will increase and enhance precision medicine resources for healthcare organizations of all sizes. To contact one of our solution specialists and schedule a personalized product demo, please click the "Learn More" button below.


About the Author: Chantel Soumis

Chantel Soumis represents the Marketing Department at Extract as Marketing Manager. Chantel studied marketing communications and business administration at Franklin University and proceeded to work in a fast, ambitious environment, assuring client delight in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. Passionate about project productivity and streamlining workflows through the use of technology, Chantel strives to inform organizations of Extract’s advanced OCR solution by mastering communications and messaging while delivering helpful information and supporting resources.