A recent government review of the United States’ process for organ transplantation, provided to the Washington Post, revealed numerous flaws in the system currently being run by the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) (Disclaimer: Extract Systems exhibits our technology at UNOS’ Transplant Management Forum each year).
The report, conducted by the White House Digital Service, outlined a lack of audits, unreliable system uptime, and a reliance on manual data entry.
UNOS has responded regarding a number of the issues, with outgoing chief executive Brian Shepard noting that the organization will have a cyber-hygiene review from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and penetration testing from a government recommended firm. Shepard took issue with the report as a whole, calling it more of an op-ed than a research piece.
The government has issued a request for information, but not proposals, regarding the future of the system so potential competitors will be lining up. Regardless of who owns the contract, it seems like there’s plenty of work to be done. What really stood out to the Extract team, though, was the quote below:
“When nearly 100 percent of hospitals use electronic records, the notion that we rely on human beings to enter data into databases is crazy. It should be 85 to 95 percent automatic. We could concentrate more on improving patient care.”
We couldn’t agree more with Dr. Hirose because our software is currently eliminating manual data entry and automating delivery of that data to downstream systems in hospitals across the country. UNOS’ Shepard indicated that some hospitals aren’t modern enough to automate data entry, but we think it’s an achievable goal for any organization.
Extract’s HealthyData and LabDE platforms leverage machine learning and our other proven algorithms to process all faxed or scanned documents across your organization. It reads and classifies documents regardless of structure, then finds the key pieces of discrete data you want, delivering them and the document to your EHR, DMS, or other downstream system. This decreases the time and effort required to triage documents, improves accuracy, and makes it easier for clinicians to find relevant information in patients’ charts.
Automation of manual data entry gets faxed documents and relevant clinical data into the EHR quicker, with higher quality and accuracy. Better discrete data capture from external documents leads to improved quality reporting and allows for trendable data within the EHR.
If you’re manually entering in discrete data, having clinicians searching through the EHR for clinical data, seeing errors in your data, you could probably benefit from Extract’s software solutions. To learn more about how we accurately capture data and send it to downstream systems, please reach out today.
About the Authors: Andrew Loeffler & Chris Mack
Andrew is a Project Manager and Customer Support Specialist at Extract with 12 years’ experience in the healthcare IT industry. He worked at Epic Systems on the technical services and vendor relations teams for a decade and has partnered with IT teams and clinicians at major healthcare organizations. Andrew is experienced in managing development, working with customer teams on version upgrades and implementation projects to deliver healthcare software solutions on time and under budget. He is passionate about developing products and innovative solutions to tackle healthcare challenges.
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.