It’s one thing for a company selling automation software to write blog after blog about why we’re expecting many more healthcare organizations to invest in automation software, as it’s more than a bit self-serving. With that in mind, we were excited to see how industry publication EHRIntelligence decided to wrap up 2022, interviewing executives from athenahealth, Surescripts, and MEDITECH, who pointed toward EHR Optimization and Clinical Automation as the top priorities for 2023.
MEDITECH’s predictions from the EHR side of things involves many healthcare organization’s standing pat in terms of which health record company they use. They’ll instead be looking to make better use of their existing software and look for new technologies and processes that can extend the impact of a hospital’s investment in their EHR.
This one is a tough call because on the one hand, it feels like there’s a new headline every week outlining the tough earnings results for hospitals, but on the other, a quick search will show you that organizations are still switching EHRs at a rapid pace, so something will have to give in 2023; potentially, the move toward optimization.
All of the executives interviewed kept coming back to a familiar topic for anyone who even tangentially follows healthcare news, burnout. I’m not sure how much of a difference seeing one fewer alert or having a piece of data at your fingertips versus in a pdf makes in terms of turnover or job satisfaction, but it’s clearly where the rubber meets the road for staff from supply chain and document management, and then in clinical care and revenue cycle. Satisfaction with technology is low so it needs to be addressed for morale as much as it does efficiency.
Surescripts emphasized that while staffing shortages are bad now, they could get even worse with 20% of primary care physicians planning on retirement in the next two years. It’s not practical, and frankly not feasible, to be able to have 1:1 staffing replacements in these roles. In Surescripts’ world, it’s doing things like automatically populating data needed for a prior authorization prescription.
athenahealth foresees even more of a move toward value-based care, which means more focus on outpatient care, health maintenance plans, and managing people’s health before it becomes a crisis.
Our healthcare workers are being asked to perform tedious tasks like putting barcode labels on documents or manually enter lab results. They’re filling out prior authorization forms with data they already have and transcribing from release of information forms to share records. They’re doing this work with incomplete, incorrect, missing, or duplicate data because filing an outside document to the media tab is the only way that the door to HIM won’t be blocked by paper.
Perhaps worst of all, they don’t need to be doing these things. Our view on automation is that it should always save you money and it should always make your organization better. Our HealthyData software acts as a universal interface, reading and identifying any document you receive, regardless of structure, delivering the document and the key pieces of data within it anywhere you want. This means we’ll work with your existing EHR, DMS, LMS, etc.
Looking back at the MEDITECH prediction, Extract offers the solution that will maximize the investment you’ve made in your technology infrastructure. We work with the most complex health systems in the country and provide them with cost savings that far exceed the cost of our product (one of our HIMSS Stage 7 accredited customers cut their data entry costs in half with the software). We also allow healthcare personnel to work at the top of their licensure, doing what they were hired to do, armed with better information to do it.
Whether you need all the data from disparate locations to create a health maintenance plan, want release of information requests processed four times faster, want your discrete data in your EHR instead of a PDF, are trying to hit HIMSS 7 entry speeds, or have any other types of documents you’d like turned into data with ease, let us know.
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.