HealthyData Blog
In healthcare, there are so many regulations and technologies to stay current on. In our HealthyData blog, you will read everything from CMS meaningful use to EMR news, clinical best practices and QAPI program initiatives.
In theory, centralizing your incoming documents seems like a grand idea. You have a core group of people who do things consistently, know the documents and are managed by a single department.
Physician burnout is at an extremely high rate. Doctors and nurses everywhere are expected to keep up with management changes, new hospital mandates, technology in procedures, all the while keeping their clinical care first-class. I’ve read countless articles about predictions that the burnout rate will rise
I can guarantee that anybody reading this blog uses machine learning dozens of times each day without even realizing it. When you perform a web, search using Google or Bing, for instance, the search engine works so well because their software has figured out how to predict searches and rank pages for you.
It is a way for healthcare organizations to prove that their patients are their number one priority. By proving the quality of compliance, organizations can prove that year over year their quality in care is constantly improving. By being able to prove compliance is important within an organization, there is a direct correlation to better patient satisfaction, more patients, better opportunities for successful outreach, and staying in business.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is powerful software that transforms images such as faxes and scanned documents into human readable text. Access to this text is very powerful and can be used for many purposes. The questions below will help you determine whether or not you could benefit from an OCR solution.
I recently spent three days driving across the northern Midwestern States and through a good part of Canada with a longtime friend as we headed to a once-in-a-lifetime wilderness adventure. As you might imagine our conversations spanning those 72 hours took as many twists and turns as did the roads we traveled. However, one saying my friend repeated several times stood out among many insightful remarks he’d made, “Your judgement is only as good as your information.“
Do you frequently find yourself searching for and routing documents, whether paper or electronic, to colleagues, care team members or departments that need them? Or, worse do you find yourself waiting for documents to be routed to you? In our work, helping hospitals to automate clinical data abstraction, we're struck by the hours of time lost each day to inefficient workflows involving "loose" records that we often find ourselves helping our customers extract data from.
A consultant who supports analytics for population health and quality of care recently told me that frequently, they can only access 80% or less of the total data needed for these initiatives.
If that data is truly random and characteristic of the whole body of data, than acquiring 80% of it is pretty good, perhaps even great. But what if that 80% comes largely from one population sub-group. What if it represents patients who are local - city-dwellers who live nearby and come directly to your facility for lab work and other tests - while the missing 20% is a completely different population. Perhaps this 20% is defined differently by lifestyle, geography or other variables because that population cannot easily come to your facility?
As with every study, the article laid out the limitations of this particular study, which focused on blood pressure only, before getting into the detailed results of their work. The seven limitations they named were quite typical, including possible duplicate data and possible non-reporting of improved patients, but the limitation that seemed most unnecessary and raised my blood pressure indeed was, “Sixth, incentive program CQM reporting was based only on the data available in the EHR system of the health care provider. If a patient transitioned to another provider, such as a specialist, the original EHR might not have subsequent, possibly improved, blood pressure values recorded.”
