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.
Many of you know the fairly tale tilted, "Goldilocks and the Three Bears." Upon entering the home of the Three Bears, Goldilocks sits in their chairs, eats their porridge, and falls asleep in their beds. Upon sampling each of the Bear's chairs, porridge, and beds she exclaims that one is too much, the other is not enough, but the last option is just right. What does this fairy tale have to do with Healthcare data and performing one's job, you may ask?
Having access to quality data in the EHR is paramount when using the data for decision making. If clinicians have to search through the media/documents tab in the EMR or they have faxes stuck in the system, staff does not have up-to-date information to use for the decision making process. This could potentially put a patient’s safety at risk and greatly delay the treatment process.
Ahhh, the age old question. Can (or should) tasks that humans can do very well, but perhaps not very efficiently, be automated with technology? While the views on this topic would vary greatly from an abstraction service provider to a low-budget medical research project manager, there are perhaps a few things that could be defined to help one decide what is best for their particular medical record abstraction situation. Consider these ideas:
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”.
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...
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 attended the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) conference during the week of October 16 and learned about the complexities of copy-and-paste in healthcare. It’s a common problem that Extract’s automated data capture can help with.
The copy-and-paste function (CPF) is extremely prevalent in the EHR in efforts to improve efficiencies, foster prompt communication and increase time spent with patients. At the event, I learn that 7.4% of charts contain CPF information. This isn’t good for the following reasons...
Non-interfaced data in healthcare is the “bane” of all clinical and administrative staff. If data is not interfaced, it’s not in the fields of the EMR, not in flow sheets, reports, trend analysis, etc. It causes more work for it to be moved, stored, and made accessible in EMR as scanned documents or otherwise. It makes continuation of care and quality of care much, much harder.
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.
It couldn’t happen to us.
I doubt anyone still feels that a HIPAA breach is impossible in their organization. Results speak louder than words.
A quick search reveals that every year there is a large number of breaches in the US. There is no doubt these organizations know the threat of HIPAA breaches have taken some number of steps to protect against a breach but there is always more that could have been done to reduce/eliminate the exposure.
Let’s be honest. We could all use an extra hour in the day. Or two… or three… or even just 30 minutes!
In working with labs we have found one of the biggest pain points is the inability to find the time to scan or fax in lab results and manually enter the data into the EMR. This is an enormous issue, considering if these results aren’t entered into the EMR quickly and accurately, someone’s life could be in harm’s way.
