How to Leverage Data to Optimize Results
What is compliance and why it’s important in healthcare?
It is a way for healthcare organizations to prove that patients are their number one priority. By proving they are compliant, organizations can prove their quality of care is constantly improving, year-over-year. Organizations that can prove they are compliant can typically show a direct correlation to better patient satisfaction, more patients, better opportunities for successful outreach, and staying in business.
What is needed to achieve compliance?
To achieve compliance, good processes and procedures in place are key, but most importantly data is needed. To be measured, data needs to be supplied. If you can’t supply data, then there is no way to ensure that your healthcare organization is compliant, and could be shut down.
What are some compliance challenges?
Manual Data Entry: In most organizations, there is a massive need for discrete data, which forces data to be entered into the patient’s electronic medical record (EMR), manually. You can imagine this leads to human errors, as well as taking time away from staff that they could be spent focusing on other pressing issues that require their, human, expertise.
Turnaround Time: There are some patients with pressing clinical needs, and their data can be extremely time sensitive, which leads to data entry backlogs within departments. Certain departments, such as Transplant departments, have such a large volume of time-sensitive data needing to be manually entered that they hire full-time employees to manage wait-lists. If the can’t hire a full-time employee then they are at the mercy of their coordinators to try and manage the wait-lists, whom have far too many additional duties and typically cannot keep up with the volume.
Ever-increasing Backlog: Other challenges include, staff turnover or time-off. Both challenges effect workflows and patient results will get stacked up and might not be entered for days.
Post-treatment: If a patient has undergone a procedure such as; a transplant operation, your organization is responsible to track that patient’s results. You need to provide data into the EMR that allows communication between providers that can later detect problems. The quicker that your organization can recognize patient problems, the earlier intervention begins, leading to improved patient outcomes.
How to keep your healthcare organization compliant?
Extract Systems has developed a software that allows your organization to speed up the process of automating data entry. Extract can automate your document handling and data entry workflows, with minimal time and effort from your staff. Your staff would be able to spend their time focusing on other pressing issues, instead of manually entering time sensitive patient lab results into the EMR.
For more information about Juggling Quality of Care and Compliance: How to leverage data to optimize results, watch this Transplant Compliance Webinar:
Featuring: Dr. John Daller, President Strategic Illuminations, LLC and Gary Sigle, Administrative Director, Abdominal Organ Transplantation St. Luke’s Hospital, Kansas City, MO
