Orlando Health Automates To Satisfy Legislation
Major healthcare systems are always looking for ways to share information faster and more accurately. Sometimes, advancements in these fields come from technological foresight, but often new regulations will be the driving force behind the push.
Last summer, Florida enacted a law that puts tighter timeframes on notifications that need to get to primary care physicians. Within 24 hours of a hospital admission, PCPs must be alerted, and within 14 days of a discharge, they must receive a discharge summary and any related medical records. There’s also a provision that will allow patients to ask for their primary care provider to be consulted by the hospital.
Orlando Health was able to solve this problem through automation. They implemented a system that facilitates two-way interaction between the hospital team and the primary care team, replacing slower and more error-prone methods like phone calls and faxes. They also now send the discharge materials automatically, rather than relying on EHR-generated alerts and requiring clinicians to research provider information.
Removing unnecessary EHR work for clinicians is a great step toward reducing burnout and improving patient quality of care. More than just having engaged clinicians with less administrative work on their minds, the communication with a patient’s PCP will reduce redundant or completely unneeded testing.
While the impetus for implementing this technology may have been legislative, Orlando Health took the opportunity to go far beyond guaranteeing the minimum turnaround times. In ensuring that their patients’ PCPs are fully informed, they’ve given their clinicians time back in their day and shifted the burden of keeping the organization in compliance from people to an automated software.
We get excited when we see solutions like this, that allow valuable staff to spend their time with patients as opposed to spending it doing clerical work. While the solution Orlando Health is implementing focuses on removing the fax machine from sending information, Extract’s solution is designed to remove faxes, scans, and unstructured documents from receiving information.
From large hospitals and labs to critical access locations, healthcare organizations receive a lot of information from local labs and providers, with a good portion of it not interfaced and in an unstructured
format. Our solution is to automate the ingestion of this information, using optical character recognition to turn these documents into only the discrete data you need, delivered directly to an EHR or system of your choice.
If you’d like to learn how your administrative staff can work on higher value projects than data entry and how your clinicians can always find accurate discrete data where it belongs in the EHR, please reach out today.
