Indexing

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24th Annual UNOS Transplant Management Forum: One More for the Books

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24th Annual UNOS Transplant Management Forum: One More for the Books

Once again I had the pleasure of attending the 24th Annual UNOS Transplant Management Forum for my 4th time earlier this year.  As always, it was a flurry of learning, knowledge-sharing, networking, and well-deserved awards for leaders in the industry.

It was as apparent this time as it was every time before, that the transplant community is a close-knit group who all struggle with similar things regardless of their geographical location. These struggles span across many areas, including financial, staffing, regulatory requirements, lack of organs, information technology, reporting, managing the constant deluge of paper, and many more.  While I can't claim that Extract can help with all of these, there are two specific struggles that we excel at fixing: extracting discrete results from faxed external lab results and intelligently splitting, classifying, and filing large documents (such as referral packets) into patients' charts.

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Navigate a Transplant System Improvement Agreement #6

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Navigate a Transplant System Improvement Agreement #6

Today, we will continue our discussion about the System Improvement Agreement (SIA) and the various deliverables that will be required by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to emerge successfully. 

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How to Navigate a Transplant System Improvement Agreement Process Blog #5: The IPRT Visit and Action Plan

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How to Navigate a Transplant System Improvement Agreement Process Blog #5: The IPRT Visit and Action Plan

Today, we will discuss the Independent Peer Review Team (IPRT) and the action plan that will be developed and implemented following their visit. 

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How to Navigate a Transplant System Improvement Agreement Process Blog #4

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How to Navigate a Transplant System Improvement Agreement Process Blog #4

Previously we have discussed in general what happens when your center comes under regulatory scrutiny and what you can expect.  Today, we will begin to look in greater detail at what a System Improvement Agreement (SIA) entails, the items that the hospital commits to fulfill and some strategies for addressing them.

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How to Navigate a Transplant System Improvement Agreement Process #3: The System Improvement Agreement

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How to Navigate a Transplant System Improvement Agreement Process #3: The System Improvement Agreement

The System Improvement Agreement (SIA)

In our previous post, we discussed what happens when your program receives a letter from either the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) or the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and your program's initial response.  Today we will focus on what happens if CMS does not accept your mitigating factors application. 

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Quality Reporting in the EMR

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Quality Reporting in the EMR

Despite massive adoption of electronic medical records over the past several years, the promise of easy and nearly effortless chart abstraction from electronic medical records enabled by an interconnected web of interoperable EMRs sharing standardized data has yet to be fully realized.  You need to look no further than the media tab to see the evidence that we have yet to arrive at this Utopian future.

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How to Navigate a Transplant System Improvement Agreement Process #2: You Received a Letter in the Mail, Now What?

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How to Navigate a Transplant System Improvement Agreement Process #2: You Received a Letter in the Mail, Now What?

Should you receive a letter from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the focus will likely be on a failure to meet one of the Conditions of Participation, most likely related to either graft or patient survival relative to expected results.  Under the authority of 42 CFR §488.61, a transplant program may request that CMS consider mitigating factors in the re-approval process.  There are three general areas that will be reviewed to determine whether a program can be approved based upon mitigating factors.  These areas include, but are not limited to, the extent to which the outcome measures are met or exceeded, the availability of Medicare-approved transplant centers in the geographic area or extenuating circumstances that may have a temporary effect on the program's ability to meet the Conditions of Participation. 

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Can clinical data abstraction improve care quality?

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Can clinical data abstraction improve care quality?

Clinical data abstraction is often one of the last steps in the patient care information workflow. Typically it's performed for the sole purpose of submitting data to compliance or quality improvement measurement programs.

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Is Your EMR Inbox Managing You?

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Is Your EMR Inbox Managing You?

There’s no question that users rely on the EMR In Basket for day-to-day workflow management. The “In Basket” or “Inbox,” depending on what EMR you’re using, provides a centralized location to receive notifications and important patient information, such as admission and discharge notifications, new lab results, refill requests, patient calls, appointment reminders, patient portal communication and much more.

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Save Time With Document Classification

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Save Time With Document Classification

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.

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EMR data conversions without queries

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EMR data conversions without queries

If you've ever managed an EMR data conversion, you likely know how painful data conversions can be. They require someone with intimate knowledge of the old EMR to write complex queries to extract the data in the format that the new EMR requires it to be in. In addition, at some point in the process you have to transform the old values into the new system's values (assuming they can be mapped at all!). Even if you have experienced, intelligent people and excellent vendor support during this process it is expensive, time-consuming, risky, and can delay your go-live. So, what if you don't have experienced people and good vendor support for your healthcare data conversion? Believe me, it's gonna get ugly.

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How to automate critical results reporting for priority patients

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How to automate critical results reporting for priority patients

Critical results reporting or reporting lab results for priority patients from non-interfaced sources is no easy task. A delay in reporting can yield an unfortunate outcome for a patient whose condition is deteriorating. This is especially true for specialty departments that provide continued care for patients from far-flung locales, such as the transplant program. One transplant department receives thousands of these reports over a single patient's lifetime, and often hundreds of these documents for its patient population each day by fax.

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How to Navigate a Transplant System Improvement Agreement Process #1: What does the data mean?

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How to Navigate a Transplant System Improvement Agreement Process #1: What does the data mean?

 Our next series of blogs will discuss the triggers that bring your program under scrutiny, the preliminary inquiries that are made, your options and the transplant System Improvement Agreement (SIA) process.

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Still using paper? Read this!

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Still using paper? Read this!

Still using paper? It’s time to think about automating. Learn more in this blog.

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Better Healthcare Data: Three things I learned from customers in 2015

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Better Healthcare Data: Three things I learned from customers in 2015

With the final days of 2015 upon us, I would like to thank Extract’s customers and colleagues for your support and engagement this year. It’s been a significant year for our company which I’ll boil down by sharing two exciting milestones.