Indexing

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Are "too many clicks" part of your health data challenges?

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Are "too many clicks" part of your health data challenges?

Health data challenges are a part of any healthcare organization. Frustration is a natural consequence. This is also a common topic in most healthcare press lately. It often feels like depending on which way the wind is blowing, the consensus is that EMR adoption by clinicians is either improving or getting worse. A recent KLAS report indicates adoption is improving across the globe. The decision to move to an enterprise EMR for most organizations often includes as a factor the goal of reducing the total number of applications supported. Initiatives to improve adoption then becomes a challenge if your department's prized application is removed for something "less than robust". Along with pain and frustration, keeping your clinicians happy is also a challenge

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Transplant Evaluation- Part 3

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Transplant Evaluation- Part 3

Transplant Evaluation Process Part 3 in a 6 part blog series

Once the transplant evaluation visit has been completed, the required testing and other consults that were ordered or deemed necessary need to be completed. Frequently, this is the most time consuming segment of the evaluation process and where automation can be most useful. 

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Transplant Evaluation- Part 2

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Transplant Evaluation- Part 2

The Initial Evaluation

The evaluation process is really the lifeline of your program. If not done properly, your program will lack good candidates for transplant or will have insufficient patients to transplant. This is a critical topic! In our first blog of this series, we focused mainly on what happens when a new patient is referred to your program.

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Say Yes to Fewer Transcription Errors

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Say Yes to Fewer Transcription Errors

In a recent Health Informatics Journal article reporting of “true integration” of electronic laboratory results, it was mentioned that transcription errors remain a bottleneck with comprehensive electronic health records. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to those who encounter paper labs every day in their daily workflow. For most hospitals, a significant number of records are interfaced. But if you are working with paper daily, you might think it debatable that manual data entry is insignificant.

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Clinical data stuck in unstructured formats… It’s enough to raise your blood pressure.

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Clinical data stuck in unstructured formats… It’s enough to raise your blood pressure.

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.”

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Research and PHI – Oh, the many issues…

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Research and PHI – Oh, the many issues…

In the course of a clinical research project or trial, researchers must gather patient data and records and prepare them for adjudication and analysis. In keeping with the spirit of HIPAA and PHI regulations, the organization conducting this research or trial likely wishes to control access from both within and outside of its firewall to ensure that any potential for breach of this personal information is strictly curtailed. 

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IOM Identifies Health Information Integration as a Failure Point

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IOM Identifies Health Information Integration as a Failure Point

Yesterday, the prestigious Institute of Medicine (IOM) announced a soon-to-be-released report highlighting diagnostic errors as a persistent “blind spot in the delivery of quality health care” and urges the healthcare industry to change in order to address the prevalence of diagnostic errors, which the IOM defines as “the failure to (a) establish an accurate and timely explanation of the patient’s health problem(s) or (b) communicate that explanation to the patient.”

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“If I live to be 90, I’ll never have enough interfaces for our labs."

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“If I live to be 90, I’ll never have enough interfaces for our labs."

Will you ever have all the interfaces you need?

“If I live to be 90 years old, I’ll never have enough interfaces for our labs,” the lab director of a large healthcare organization recently commented. “And with the costs and ongoing maintenance, how can we afford them?”

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Lab Results Interoperability- Part 2

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Lab Results Interoperability- Part 2

Last week I published the first in a series of seven blog posts that discuss some of the misconceptions about lab interfaces and intelligent clinical data extraction software.

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Lab Results Interoperability- Part 1

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Lab Results Interoperability- Part 1

There are several misconceptions about interfaces and intelligent clinical data extraction software and lab results interoperability in general that I’ll attempt to clear up in a series of seven blog posts.

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Why do we have EMRs again?

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Why do we have EMRs again?

Why do we have EMRs again? Were they meant to be electronic file folders?  No, they are meant to hold discrete, structured data and add value by summarizing the most valuable data, giving us a more complete picture of a patient’s history, and allowing us to analyze and see trends in the data while automatically alerting us to data outside of allowed values. 

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Outreach Workshop Part 3: Establishing your own brick and mortar facility

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Outreach Workshop Part 3: Establishing your own brick and mortar facility

In our first two blogs of this series, we discussed outreach programs beginning with education and facilitating improved patient care in the local community. What happens when the success of these efforts require a more frequent and sustained presence in the local medical community, particularly if the main facility is at a distance and precludes frequent visits by your team? In these cases, it may be beneficial to consider establishing your own brick and mortar facility to provide services to the patients on a routine basis.

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Transplant is Joining the Jet Age. Will test results be able to keep up?

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Transplant is Joining the Jet Age. Will test results be able to keep up?

In an article in Forbes business magazine today, Peter Ubel, begins to investigate the question of whether or not we should be striving for a world in which all transplant candidates should have access to LearJets so that they can place themselves on multiple waiting lists and have a greater chance of reaching the top of that list in time?  No matter how you feel personally or professionally about this issue, an important point that he raises in the world of transplant is this: as technology (planes, drugs, etc.) improves and allows for greater possibilities of organs for a greater pool of candidates, how can we be sure that waitlists are always accurate and up to date.

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Justify Before you Buy - Part 2

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Justify Before you Buy - Part 2

Part Two: it’s time to go ask for permission (budget) to purchase this solution.