We all know how COVID accelerated the adoption of telemedicine. The IoT (Internet of Things) is also adding to the ability to monitor and care for more and more patients outside the walls of the hospital, long term care (LTC) facilities, and clinics. Pharmacogenomics, where genetic attributes are tied to therapeutic drugs, is growing rapidly. These are just three examples of growing sources of data. There are many more. All the sources share a common thread, they are part of healthcare’s digital transformation benefits.
What is digital transformation in healthcare? Grazitti.com defines it well:
Digital Transformation in Healthcare: All You Need to Know (grazitti.com)
“Digital transformation in healthcare is making use of the latest technologies, processes, and methodologies to deliver optimal value to patients, healthcare professionals, and organizations.
It provides the agility to improve the operational efficiency of healthcare organizations and enhance the overall experiences of patients.
Digital transformation in healthcare leverages foundational technologies such as Big Data, IoT, Web 3.0, PaaS/SaaS, and Unified Communications. The resulting processes are, thus, automated, mobile, and fast.”
Note that in addition to the emergence of disruptive technologies to care for patients in creative and effective ways, successful digital transformation efforts will rely on the “Easy Access to Healthcare Data” across the healthcare continuum. In order to best care for patients, data has to flow effortlessly across all the health system’s information systems for their long-term, ambulatory, and acute care locations. Utopia is reached when this data also flows effortlessly across different health systems.
If you’ve worked in the healthcare environment for even a short while, you know that means interoperability. Interoperability is the ability of computer systems or software to exchange and make use of information. In a health system, that means that data needs to flow between sources and repositories inclusive of:
EMRs (electronic medical records)
Acute care based patient monitoring systems
Medical IoTs
CPOE (computerized provider order entry)
Image management systems (i.e. PACS)
Prescribing systems
Mobile computing
Telemedicine
Administration
Data exchange networks (i.e. HIEs)
Laboratory Results
Accounts Payable
Contract Management
Revenue Cycle
Payroll
Clinics (in system and outside)
LTC (in system and outside)
Michael Stearns and Susan Clark said it best when they stated in their article in the Journal of AHIMA, “the ability to share semantically interoperable electronic health information (EHI) among organizations, patients, payers, and other stakeholders has remained limited.”
Preparing for the Rising Tide of Interoperability in Healthcare (ahima.org)
What does that ultimately mean? One of Extract Systems customers, a 16-hospital health system, told us they have over 21,000,000 pages of documentation that is coming from sources inside and outside of the health system that are not coming from interoperable information systems. Annually. Some of those documents need to be linked to the patient record in the EMR. Some need to have important discrete data elements abstracted to the patient record. In both cases, the data and information has to be easily and readily available to the healthcare provider.
Why does this cadre of 21,000,000 annual documents exist? Likely the interfaces don’t exist or, because they are produced by sources that are small in output per source but many in sheer number of sources, the interfaces are cost prohibitive to purchase and maintain. With that said, health systems are left to find ways to process those documents in the most effective way to get the information and data into the information systems. Usually this is done through human FTEs.
The question is, with human FTEs being more and more scarce, more expensive, as well as prone to error, is that the best route to get all the right data for the right patient so it can be found at the right time by the right provider?
Please request a demo and we’d be happy to show you some of the ways automation fuels interoperability.
About the Author: Norm Kruse
Norm is a Business Development Manager with experience in Healthcare and Telecommunications technologies. He earned his BS – Business Administration at Winona State University and his MBA – IT Concentration at the Carlson School of Business at the University of Minnesota. Technology applied to workflow design is a focused area of interest.