California Correctional Health Care Services is using IT to reduce hospitalizations for high risk-patients and won the 2018 Davies Community Award of Excellence.
If you back up ten years, California Correctional Health Care Services was swimming in paper. “Tens of thousands of inches of healthcare records were spread out across the state at more than 30 institutions – as well as a more than 150,000 square foot warehouse archive. The patient population reached numbers of more than 125,000 individuals, with approximately 600 new arrivals every week and roughly 11,000 transfers monthly.”
With that volume of paper documents, it’s no surprise they would sometimes wind up lost during transfers to different locations. In addition to lost records, most processes were human-dependent and healthcare risks were not considered appropriately during patient placement. During this time, ”placing vulnerable, clinically complex patients in inappropriate locations was identified as a frequent contributor to potentially avoidable adverse health outcomes.”
In 2009, California Correctional took a step in the right direction, by introducing a process that established a few factors to consider when housing individuals and introduced the concept of a "basic" versus "intermediate" care institution. While they saw improvements, it still was a very human and paper dependent process, and was often not up to date or accurate. This is because staff spent large amounts of time dedicated to identifying, updating, and communicating those factors that were key to proper patient placement.
The next step was to improve on the staff and paper dependent process. To do so, California Correctional began the multi-year journey to shift business practices from paper to electronic, and the organization also looked to automate the clinical risk tracking system.
They saw improvements in several areas:
Improved the patent placement for high-risk patients by nearly 20%
o Improved accuracy
o Improved consistency
o Improved transparency
By automating the clinical risk classification, they save more than $2 million within the first three years
Here at Extract, we know just how important both your clinicians’ time is as well as the information your organization is receiving. That is why we have developed a software, HealthyData, that can take your incoming faxes and/or scanned documents (such as healthcare records, labs, etc.) and automatically pull and place the data you want into your EHR. If you would like to learn more about how our software can fit into your organization, please feel free to reach out today.
About the Author: Taylor Genter
Taylor is the Marketing Specialist at Extract with experience in data analytics, graphic design, and both digital and social media marketing. She earned her Bachelor of Business Administration degree in Marketing at the University of Wisconsin- Whitewater. Taylor enjoys analyzing people’s behaviors and attitudes to find out what motivates them, and then curating better ways to communicate with them.