There are many changes taking place in the healthcare industry, perhaps the most important of all is unbundling of care — into a more open, local, and transparent model that delivers greater control to patients.
How we access healthcare is changing. In the past, when we got sick, we all traveled a similar patient journey. We went to our doctor, or if our symptoms were more serious, we went to the hospital. We got diagnosed and treated, and either were hospitalized or returned home.
Today, we have many different points of access to this care beyond the hospital walls. We can receive care from retail clinics, community centers, behavioral health clinics, home healthcare providers, and virtual visits, among other options. COVID-19 has accelerated this trend, making it more acceptable for people to seek accessible, convenient, and affordable care wherever it is available.
Payers are encouraging this shift since care is costly in hospitals and patients increasingly prefer to remain in their homes and receive care conveniently via today’s technologies (telehealth, at-home testing kits, remote monitoring systems) or through medical professionals coming to them. Thanks to these and other technological advancements, along with increased public openness to receiving new methods of care, the boundaries of clinical capacity can now extend beyond traditional physical and geographic lines.
The impact on care coordination
As a result of these shifting market dynamics, there is a lot more fragmentation in the market, which has created an increased need for improved care coordination and data. The ability for a patient’s provider care team members to share data and collaborate even though the care providers may be on disparate EMR systems is/has been a problem. The promise of improved collaboration among providers, overall improvement in care quality, and ultimately successful patient outcomes cannot be realized without a successful patient care coordination program. Extract Systems solves this dilemma. Extract Systems has been helping our clients for over 20 years, to unlock the value of the data on transfer medical records and their outside lab reports.
An article in JAMA examining waste in the U.S. healthcare system cited ineffective care coordination contributing up to $80 billion in wasted spend. This is because healthcare is often in silos, which leads to miscommunication, unclear ownership, fragmented patient care, and frequently poor outcomes, particularly among the most vulnerable populations.
Implementing Extract Systems as part of your overall care coordination strategy can help to bridge gaps and connect silos among care teams. Key to this is the ability to capture and place data into your patients’ care encounters via their EMR. But how do you do this with thousands of faxes, outside medical records, and non-interfaced lab reports coming to your health systems every month? Do you hire teams to input this data? Do you NOT input this critical data and hope that your providers can locate it when reviewing scanned in medical records? Or do you implement Extract Systems machine learning and natural language processing-based technology to ensure you always have the data in your EMR? I think the choice is easy.
Conclusion
The disaggregation of healthcare holds the promise of ushering in a new model of care delivery — one that is more accessible, personalized, and cost-effective — while still delivering value. The key to its success lies in ensuring that all participants in the care continuum have access to real-time patient data and the ability to coordinate and collaborate with other providers across care settings during patient encounters.
About the Author: Josh Nail
Josh is the Regional Business Development Manager at Extract with more than 18 years of experience in the healthcare marketplace. His healthcare background includes Revenue Cycle software solutions, HIM software solutions and EHR solutions. When not helping Health Systems improve patient care, increase provider satisfaction while delivering a return on investment you can find him Fly-fishing, Skiing, or playing Golf.