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.
Do you ever find yourself asking "how could we still be processing so much paper and faxes in the year 2017?" Sometimes, it can feel like there are mountains of paper that need to be climbed and processed with no summit in sight. There are EMR's, Care Everywhere, FHIR, HIE's, reference lab interfaces, and hundreds of other ways to exchange information electronically. But here we are…still seeing hundreds or even thousands of actual faxes per day in clinics and HIM departments.
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.
The Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) has been in place for over 4 months now. It consolidated and improved Meaningful Use, PQRS, and VBPM and added some new Improvement Activities to your to-do list. By all accounts, it's a better system that will hopefully improve the healthcare we receive across the nation. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been a lot of work!
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...
