I am in the final stages of a sales effort with a midwestern healthcare organization. My champion and I were collaborating on a justification presentation that she will be giving to the decision makers. She said, “We’re spending a lot of time thinking about the immediate cost savings and improvement to patient care. What about the value of all of this data a few years from now when we can use the discrete data we’ve collected to answer all kinds of important questions.”
I was caught off guard because most customers are laser focused on the immediate payback. I thought cutting costs and improving care, all at the same time, sounds pretty compelling.
In her case, the organization currently relies on paper and scanned images. Her team only keys into the EMR a very small percentage of the large volume of data that passes through her department. The immediate benefit of automating the extraction of data will be found in automating the data entry workflow, but a much bigger bang are the efficiencies gained by nurses and physicians that spent too much time searching for critical clinical data getting ready for appointments. If they weren’t searching through paper or scanned documents, they could either visit longer with each patient, or they could see more patients every day.
This is where she surprised me. She continued, “These short-term gains are great, but we can’t forget about the longer-term gains. Think about all the good decisions we’ll be able to make three years from now when we can look back on all of this new discrete data. It’s searchable and trend-able.”
And that’s what inspired the name of this article. There’s lots of value in the data right now and lots later too. The Now and Later candy was introduced in 1962 and from the website they describe the marketing message like this: “The name was selected to suggest to customers that they eat some of the taffy squares in the bar right away and save the rest for another occasion.”
Her “value of data” argument got me going on a couple internet searches. Clearly, she isn’t the only person thinking about this topic. I’d like to share a little of what I discovered.
Pamela Spence, of EY Global Health Sciences and Wellness, published findings that there is enormous value in the data in the UK’s National Health Service database. This data can improve a specific patient’s care but more broadly can improve large numbers of patient’s care to the tune of £4.6bn annually. The data would also spur outside innovation in healthcare. If the data were monetized and made available to companies, another £5bn annually would flow to the UK’s health system.
A major reason why the UK’s data could be so valuable (and not in the US) is that it can be consolidated into a single longitudinal dataset for all of the patients in the UK. It is possible to trace a complete history of the patient’s demographics, health and wellness, diagnosis and treatments, procedures, and outcomes. This is not possible in the United States. Healthcare data in the US is stored in silos in many different formats - electronic and scanned and paper – and it is both structured and unstructured. The easiest way to think about it is that in the US, we have many different electronic medical record systems and they don’t communicate very well.
Back to our midwestern health system – Extract is converting the data found on faxed documents (in this case, laboratory test results) into discrete data that can be filed to the patient and to the order or encounter. As we all know, faxes are still a dominant way to deliver documents but they are not a good way to communicate data. In an automated way, Extract can transform ALL of the INCOMING OUTSIDE DOCUMENTS that healthcare organizations receive. In doing so, the immediate benefit is a big reduction in cost and a big increase in useful data.
If you’d like to learn more about how our software returns a return on investment both now and later, please reach out.
About the Author: David Rasmussen
David Rasmussen is the President of Extract. With 30 years’ experience leading software companies, David is driven by the challenge to consistently find groundbreaking ways to solve customer problems. David finds it rewarding to hit the customer’s target and create a great team, build a solid infrastructure, and emerge with a strong value proposition.