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.
The 21st Century Cures Act was officially signed on Tuesday, December 13th. It is another significant medical research appropriation bill it is optimistically another giant step toward reduced regulation and faster development and delivery of new medicine and medical devices. As exciting as that is, this bill also directs HHS and the National Director for Health Information Technology to make EHR’s interoperable.
The year is now 2017 and we have been a digital society for quite some time, but if you talk with people in the healthcare industry, you will find that paper is still floating around. In 2016, we worked with two major hospitals and you would be amazed by not only how prevalent paper documents are, but how these paper medical documents get copied and moved to different people through the hospital, this is what we call the “Paper Shuffle”.
Your clinical staff must refer to paper, faxed, and/or scanned documents because clinical data found within these documents are not found in the EHR. Your interruptions to the workflow, that was carefully designed into the EHR, costs time, money, and frustration and it may even insert errors into the healthcare decision making process.
Every good process has a starting point. In the instance of making the perfect Peanut butter and Jelly sandwich, “first you take the peanuts and you crush ‘em, you crush ‘em” (view entire peanut butter and jelly sandwich process here. Whereas, the first step of a healthcare data entry process, is document handling. First you take the paper documents, and you sort ‘em, you sort ‘em. Then you take the documents and you scan ‘em, you scan em...
I have recently talked with a few healthcare executives. They, like everyone else I know, are careful about what they say about the effect a Trump presidency will have on healthcare. This could be that they are being politically correct but it’s possible they don’t know what Trump is actually going to do. It is clear Trump’s pre-election rhetoric has softened in many areas. Only time will tell what his real intentions are.
Aurora sought a way to pull paper results into their lab interface in order to eliminate paper-based results completely while removing the slow and laborious, manual data-entry process. At first, Aurora scanned documents into the EMR, requiring providers to open up scanned documents to view results; but what providers really wanted was to have discrete, trendable lab results in one central location.
Automating the extraction of all required information from faxes or other non-interfaced sources, ensures your patients’ safety and complete, compliant information in the EMR. Any solution you use should be matching patient and order level data, collecting physician demographic information, and capturing...
I keep wondering why healthcare organizations wouldn’t want to streamline this repetitive, manual process and transform these documents into retrievable business-ready data. Think of all of the time, resources, money, and reduction in errors that could be improved upon if their workflow became automated via an advanced OCR solution and Machine Learning.
For example; a typical hospital has...
While I've never worked directly for a healthcare organization, I'm proud to say that I've spent the last 13 years working for two great companies who are making great strides to improve these very problems. At Extract, we are working tirelessly to get more data into the EMR discretely and marching towards ridding the EMR of the hide-and-seek for critical clinical data that is buried in scans, faxes, and unstructured blocks of text.
Recently while attending the AHIMA Conference last month in Baltimore I engaged in a number of conversations during the general sessions. As you may have guessed, many of the topics revolved around EMR integrations and data extraction. Being a conference for HIM professional’s, clinical documentation was also a major concern.
A few weeks ago, my colleague started the discussion on signs that you need a more automated way to get valuable information out of a document, 4 Signs You Need an Advanced OCR Solution. People turn to OCR to convert text from a fax, scanned document, or PDF into raw text that can be used more readily. Companies like ours put an intelligent layer over that OCR process and automate the extraction, pre-validation and structuring of that data so that it becomes even more useful more quickly and in a more automated way.
There are so many aspects to hospital information systems. To someone investigating a system solution or diving deeper into the world of hospital systems, a glossary may be helpful. That is why we pulled some research together. There are a lot of healthcare terms that are floating around and while your exact definition of these may differ, here is our interpretation of some of the most common ones...
UW Health is an integrated health system serving 618,000 patients each year in the Upper Midwest and beyond with 1,400 physicians, 16,500 employees, six hospitals, and 80 outpatient sites. UW Health is governed by the UW Hospitals and Clinics Authority Board, UW Health supports patient care, research, educations and community service missions of the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. UW Health was voted the best hospital in Wisconsin. UW Health has a large transplant program that has been serving WI for over 40 years.
