Proper access to medical records is a crucial piece of providing excellent patient care. It’s one of the main reasons we focus our automated data extraction software on the healthcare space. The faster clinicians have access to discrete data in a patient’s medical record, the faster they can provide quality care. Rather than leaving results as .pdfs in the EHR, we can be sure there’s no searching for relevant patient data.
Getting clinicians information faster allows patients to get information faster, but since April, the whole process has been sped up to the point where patients are usually the first to see medical results, before clinicians. Now that the Cures Act and its info blocking provisions are in effect, patients need to be provided access to, “all of their electronic health information (EHI), structured and/or unstructured, at no cost.” This has been the crux of the legislation as patients have had the right to access their medical information in the past, but it was a drawn-out process with costs and confusion along the way.
The biggest benefit to this implementation is that patients can now control their own medical data, rather than relying on one or many healthcare providers to be their data custodian. The problem associated with the change is that now patients are often the first to see results of medical tests. In cases like this, patients often don’t have the background to understand the results and can jump to improper conclusions.
They can also jump to the correct conclusion, and read about a life-altering diagnosis like a positive cancer result, without any context or plan for moving forward, making the event more difficult than it already is. This may be part of what has led half of doctors saying that they’re less candid in their patient notes than they were before this information was made available to patients. This actually may not be a negative for the one in ten patients who felt offended or judged after reading their medical notes.
Others have seen positive side effects though. Patients who do go into their medical records are better at taking their medication and remembering their treatment plans. Furthermore, the increase in access also puts a dent in issues of equitable care as non-white, older, less educated patients are seeing the greatest benefits from the data.
Overall, it seems that the shift in access has led more to some interesting anecdotes than a monumental change in the way patients and clinicians interact with data. On the whole, it seems that the benefits of increased access outweigh the costs, and issues can be mitigated with proper communication. Patients should take care to understand that it may take time to get the full context of their results and clinicians can help guide expectations in advance. If the end result is greater treatment adherence and information ownership, it’s worth finding a way to navigate the timing imbalance that may exist when results are posted.
Where Extract fits in is in speeding up the whole process of data availability. Of particular concern are the unstructured documents that flow into a healthcare organization, requiring manual classification and data entry, if the discrete results are to get into the EHR at all. Our software uses optical character recognition to read entire documents, determine what they are and the information they should contain, and then make sure that both the data and document arrive in whatever downstream system (like an EMR or DMS) that you’d like. If you’d like to learn more about our solution, please reach out or check out some of our case studies and other materials.
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.