There is a saying that if something is important, it’s worth measuring. Patient care is one of many areas of strategic importance and it makes sense to measure it. Other types of quality measures focus on everything from care at inpatient facilities and outpatient clinics to imaging facilities. In every case, accurate and timely data is required. [If you read to the end of this article, you will see examples of how Extract is helping to find and extract critical clinical data needed to diagnose and treat patients faster and more effectively.]
Standards and benchmarks can be established by the healthcare organization or standards and accreditations can be developed by governmental, for profit, or nonprofit agencies. Examples of standard setting organizations include the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the National Association for Healthcare Quality, and the National Quality Forum.
Some quality categories focus on the organization’s ability to provide effective, safe, timely, patient-focused, and equitable care. More specifically, some measures and reimbursements focus on how well an organization follows up with patients who have experienced out of range lab test results such as from a colonoscopy, A1C, Pap Smear, Ejection Fraction, etc.
Healthcare has become competitive, and organizations often tout their scores and rankings to cement a positive perception of the organization as they court more and more patients.
Payors (individuals, governments, and health plans) all want proof that the higher and higher cost of care is justified by higher and higher quality of care.
Data is at the foundation of every measurement and software is used to collect and analyze that data more effectively. With the incredible increase in available data, software is relied on more and more and will continue to be relied on for the foreseeable future.
While the focus on quality care has dominated the conversation, other areas of strategic importance have come to the forefront. An example would be the need to develop a better understanding of patient populations; the relationship with these populations is vital in a competitive business environment.
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality classifies measures into three categories:
a) Structure – focuses on capacity, systems, and processes. Areas of focus include the use of electronic medical records, automated medication order systems, and the number of board-certified physicians in staff and the ratio of providers to patients.
b) Process – measures activities intended to improve or maintain health and care standards. Most measures are process type measures.
c) Outcomes – measures the effectiveness of the organization’s patient interventions. Examples include surgical mortality, patient readmission, surgical complications, and hospital acquired infections.
Extract has provided technology to assist in automating document and data workflows that are rich in important medical data needed to effectively diagnose and treat patients. One customer has a list of laboratory test measurements that they have focused on. The first quality workflow was Pap Smear tests. Extract will help automate the location of this information in go-forward patient files but also in historical records. Once found and extracted, providers can trend results which provide insights into the patient’s current situation. The same applies to colonoscopies and a host of other results.
In another customer environment, patient referrals have proven to be very time consuming, especially for physicians. Extract automates the abstraction of large patient records and delivers to the nurse or the physician an index of document types and critical data so that clinical staff can immediately find the information needed to determine whether a patient is candidate for acceptance by Extract’s customer.
If you’re interested in seeing how our software can deliver you discrete results and save your clinicians time, please reach out and we’d be happy to have an introductory call or show you a demonstration of our software.
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.