Data Acceleration
Throughout the past several years, the healthcare industry has experienced a radical shift toward the increased availability of data. Legislation has given patients the right to access their data while interoperability projects and technology have allowed all stakeholders to receive data faster and more easily.
Delivering data quickly and accurately is at the core of what our software does, so we’re always of the mindset that the faster we can identify and send information, the better. We don’t want you to try to get every set of outside documents to be structured (an impossible task, anyway); our software views a document as a document and its contents drive what matters within it.
Speeding things up doesn’t always go according to plan though. A couple years ago, we looked at the phenomenon of patients who would jump to incorrect conclusions after seeing their medical results before having a consultation with a physician. At the time, physicians expressed that giving patients more access to their medical records caused them to be less candid in their notes. The upside of it all was that there were reports of increased adherence to medicinal regimens and treatment plans when patients accessed this data.
Now, two years later, Becker’s Hospital Review reached out to CMIOs across the industry to find out how perspectives have changed.
Concerns Linger
Reassuringly, many of those interviewed noted that they’ve not only supported the idea of giving access to patient notes, but that the physicians within their organizations have largely come around to the idea as well. The CMIOs indicated that some still worry about the issues with patients misinterpreting results; University of Tennessee Medical Center’s CMIO J. Clay Callison, MD pointed out that, “Physicians who have 10-plus years of extra training sometimes have difficulty interpreting pathology results, so we cannot expect a patient without medical experience to understand it all.”
TidalHealth’s CMIO Mark Weisman, MD, (a gracious client of ours who was kind enough to share his thoughts surrounding what his organization gained from implementing Extract’s HealthyData automation software at last year’s AHIMA Conference) told Becker’s that his organization has experienced patients learning of a cancer diagnosis through lab reports so their portal has warnings for patients to consult with their physician rather than taking patients directly to results.
Increasing Adoption
That concern is real given the stakes we’re talking about, but it’s been less of an issue than expected because adoption has been a slow process on the patient side. CMIOs from most of the health systems interviewed mentioned that the portion of notes being read ran between 10 and 20 percent. This is still a big improvement over the low single-digit figures reported before information blocking rules took effect.
An interesting outlier here was Baptist Health, where Chief Medical Information Officer Brett Oliver, MD said that the organization will “push” the note to the patient, whereupon they have an estimate that 80 percent are opened. If all things are equal in the way these health systems are measuring their numbers, Baptist may have found a great solution.
There’s certainly a balance to be struck, but at this point, CMIOs have seen essentially no pushback on opening up medical notes and records to patients, with benefits to be found on the patient care side. As the dust settles on what to do with the most consequential types of medical results, it’s clear that the pace of data continues to accelerate in healthcare.
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.