One of the main benefits for organizations implementing an Electronic Medical Records / Electronic Health Records (EMR/EHR) is to have the ability to forward any or all patient files to medical specialists and consultants (Link). While implementing an EHR certainly helps move an organization in that direction they still have to deal with the many ways that information reaches the organization. Some clinics scan documents, some labs fax results, some outside organizations even send over hard copies of documents via bonded couriers or the like.
“I heard he was going to switch to electronic medical records but he couldn't find his computer.”
(Cartoon by Joseph Farris, New Yorker)
Once documents reach an organization via fax, scan, or physical delivery they are often printed, reviewed, sorted, and filed by a large staff in order to send those physical documents along to the teams that need them to make medically relevant decisions. The discrete information in those documents is then often hand entered by a team of data entry experts before it is ever available in the EHR itself. This process has been used by organizations for many years but often has the downside of slow turnaround time and error-prone sorting. Wouldn’t it be ideal to automate the reception of these documents and immediately route them to the correct locations in the EHR for later access and reference?
A good first step is to optimize the process of receiving documents and provide the documents from all these different methods to a single location at the organization. Fax machines can be configured to place documents into a single input folder while emails and other digital transmittal processes can be automated to do the same. Physical documents will require a scanner at the point of arrival into the organization but even those can be scanned and saved to the network rather than passing physical pieces of paper from department to department.
Once you have a single digital location for incoming documents, Extract’s HealthyData product can be used to classify and route them downstream to be attached directly to patients and encounters in the EHR or queued for review by a team of trained verifiers. This process is much faster and less error-prone than the manual sorting historically used by many organizations. In addition, this product can be combined with the LabDE product to process the documents with relevant lab results and store that data discretely directly into the EHR of your choice.
So while you’ll have a full audit of your data and documents, it doesn’t need to come with stacks of incoming or duplicated paper. If you’d like to learn more about how we can help streamline the receipt of external documents and get data to your EHR faster and more accurately, please don’t hesitate to reach out to schedule a demo or discussion.
About the Author: Jeremy Schea
Jeremy is a Project Manager at Extract with more than 12 years of experience in the healthcare industry. He worked at Epic Systems for over a decade and specializes in system availability, process improvement and data analytics. Jeremy is driven by a desire to improve healthcare and solve technological problems in new and unique ways.