Technology in the electronic age has given society access to data at their fingertips, no matter what the topic. It could be learning of a breaking news event on social media or people spreading kindness in a local news outlet. Information gathering has become the norm for anyone wanting to learn more about a topic through their preferred search engine on the web. Healthcare is taking those same leaps and bounds to remove data from paper charts and input the patient’s data into Electronic Health Records (EHRs) to review patient outcomes efficiently and effectively. The data is also available for both clinician and patient to review through outlets such as MyChart.
Recently, my daughter has been suffering from an ankle/foot ailment that has been causing pain and weakness in her left foot. Her circumstance has brought about the need for many different physician referrals and numerous tests to help determine a diagnosis. As a parent concerned for my daughter’s well-being, I want both the physician and my family to receive the results as soon as they are available.
My daughter has had to undergo multiple types of tests, including x-rays, general labs, MRI’s of specific areas, an electroencephalogram (EEG), and most recently a lumbar puncture. General lab results have been received within a day, whereas radiology and pathology turnaround time has been several days to a week or more. The reason for the significant time differences has been whether the test was performed internally or externally. Internal results of patient health information are resulted rapidly due to the data staying secure within the institution. External tests present heightened security measures for the transfer of documentation to keep patients’ health records from being exposed to outside hackers. The increased wait time can be furthered on both ends, one-side being the initial order being sent out (couriered, inter-office mail, faxed) and inputted into the external database for resulting, and the second being the how the result from the external database is retrieved by the original requesting institution.
For retrieval of the lab result, Extract’s LabDE™ software solution has proven to be successful within multiple healthcare institutions, providing interoperability for abstracting lab results from external e-documents and sending the discrete data downstream to the EHR. For example, UW Health increased their transplant lab results data entry speed by 80%.
Seeing the lag in turnaround time through my daughter’s experience, as well as outside dialogue with these entities, Extract has begun focusing more attention on the need for improved efficiency of lab-order entry within reference labs. For example, a typical workflow consists of a specimen being received via courier, then the manifest is checked against the contents of the bag. The bag has the requisition, which is removed and then 15-20+ data points are keyed into the database by a staff member to process the order received from an external institution. The process has proven to be tedious and error prone, adding to turnaround time to send back the result to the requesting institution.
Extract’s capabilities can provide an interoperability safety net for automating the mundane task of manually entering the data points into a lab information system (LIS). Should your institution be struggling with these types of document workflows or others, please contact us to further discuss how we can help.
https://www.uwhealth.org/mychart/auto-release-of-test-results-in-mychart/52132
About the Author: Shane Dickson
Shane is the Regional Business Development Manager at Extract with more than 13 years of experience in the healthcare marketplace. His healthcare background includes managed care, regulatory guidelines, quality analytics, and EMR software solutions in a number of modalities. He earned a Bachelor’s degree from St. Norbert College while playing DIII collegiate hockey. Shane takes pride in listening to customers workflow issues to provide sound software solutions long-term.