Often times, when I explain to friends and family what Extract Systems does, they’re a bit surprised. Taking the important data off of healthcare documents and getting it into a medical record seems like a great cause, but they all assume that in healthcare everything is digital now. In many industries, it’s a funny occurrence when a fax machine is necessary. It’s an antiquated reminder of how data used to pass between two people.
In healthcare, where interfaces are costly to build, security is paramount, and hospitals receive documents from hundreds or even thousands of outside sources regarding their patients, fax machines are, for the time being, a necessary evil. Faxes are secure and can continue to work even when the internet is inaccessible. As recently as 2017, estimates were being thrown around that 75% of medical communication occurs via fax. Now this feels like a bit of hyperbole, but even if it is, there’s still a staggering amount of information being faxed in healthcare.
While health systems are accustomed to faxes, they’re a struggle in terms of interoperability and require tireless manual data entry to keep things up to date in patients’ medical records.
How Are Faxes Affecting COVID Results?
The New York Times reported on Monday the struggle that health systems in the areas hardest hit by COVID are having with faxed data. They’re hearing of results faxed to personal numbers instead of office numbers, duplicate results, incomplete data, and mountains of paper like the stacks captured by Harris County’s Public Health Department.
In Washington state, the paper problem was growing so much that officials had to bring in 25 members of the National Guard to help get through the manual data entry.
Even when faxes are received electronically, they often need to be printed to be manually entered into a public health database. Between the slow transmittal of a thousand faxes a day in some jurisdictions, sorting through duplicate results, and then manually entering this information, there are large delays in reporting; in Austin, it’s taking around 11 days to get the information after a COVID test is taken. While this isn’t ideal for standard medical information, it’s quite harmful for COVID tests because health officials lose the window for contact tracing.
Disease tracking lab results have been better than most in terms of their digital footprint, with 90% of them coming in electronically, but that figure is from a pre-COVID era. Now, many smaller testing companies and labs who traditionally work on employee screenings are performing COVID tests, increasing the number of formats that test results can take.
(Source: Tony Castaneda, Harris County Health, via the New York Times)
Are We Getting Good Data?
Perhaps more shocking than the time it takes to get results is that the information has largely been incomplete, with 50 percent missing addresses and 80 percent missing demographics. This leads to further delays as researchers and healthcare institutions attempt to track down this information. To be fair though, the government recommendation that demographics be included with COVID results doesn’t take effect until August.
Healthcare institutions have to grapple with the challenges of these documents arriving from non-interfaced labs and other sources, but public health departments in particular have a much more difficult time with it. The governmental programs that provided massive amounts of cash for hospitals to implement Electronic Medical Records and other forms of digitization dwarf the size of similar investments made in public health.
It would be great to work in an environment where all data is interfaced. This would mean no blurry second or third generation faxes, no looking at an image of test results in a patient’s file, and no data entered incorrectly or missing altogether.
What’s the Solution?
Interfaces are costly, and it’s frankly impractical to build an interface with a lab that might send a handful of documents each year. The solution is a software that will act as an interface for all of those unstructured, non-interfaced documents. Extract’s HealthyData platform uses optical character recognition to identify all of the text on the troublesome faxed and scanned documents, then retrieves only the discrete data you want, entering it into a patient’s medical record or other downstream system.
HealthyData enables workflow automation, allowing staff to focus on what’s important, the results, rather than manual data entry, error correction, and sorting through duplicate files. If you’d like to learn more about how we can empower your public health department or hospital system to receive data more efficiently, please reach out today.
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.