Amid increasing and ever-changing
regulation and legislation, as well as ongoing competitive pressures, the race
for excellence in healthcare is fraught with headwinds.
Providers have turned to Health
Information Technology (HIT) to help navigate the waters and to bring about the
meaningful change capable of positioning them to win the race to excellence.
Yet many healthcare organizations seem to be running with their anchors
down. Organizations that can demonstrate an ability to deliver critical
information to those who need it will ultimately be better positioned for
success.
Moving the boat forward
Due to the ongoing investment in HIT
projects, organizations around the globe have amassed enormous amounts of data.
Because that data typically resides in multiple repositories, the process of
implementing a system-wide enterprise information management program can be as
challenging as it is immense.
For true benefit to come from this
resource, data needs to be liquid so that it can move freely and easily to
those who require it as part of patient care or administrative
functions. But the enterprise systems that drive the healthcare industry,
including the EMR, are designed to deal solely with structured content.
Large amounts of critical data such as photos, explanations of benefits, lab
results and orders often arrive in an unstructured digital or paper format,
causing inefficiencies to workflow processes built to handle only structured
content. Despite HIT’s best efforts to achieve utopian environments, the anchor
of unstructured paper and digital content is still slowing the healthcare
industry down.
To put this in perspective, a recent
study from Lexmark International found that users in four Stage 7 hospitals
printed an average of 1,381 pages per user per month, for a total of 84.8
million pages across those enterprises. These organizations, despite their
advanced systems, still generate over 85 million pages as part of their
internal workflows. And paper doesn’t just come from internal sources; external
sources are capable of flooding even the most well thought out IT
architectures, causing greater inefficiencies and vulnerabilities.
It’s also estimated that only 58
percent of lab results were sent to ordering practitioners in a
structured, electronic format. This lack of structured content in the lab
negates many of the gains possible through the lab management functions
available in many of the leading EHRs.
We know that mass amounts of
unstructured content exist in the industry today. But does it really
affect healthcare? The answer is, overwhelmingly, yes. Looking at lab results
as an example, a 2009 study in the Archive of Internal Medicine found that
1 in 14 physicians failed to inform patients of abnormal test
results. Failure to inform patients in a timely manner (or at all) opens
the health system up to catastrophic failures in the care they provide and,
possibly, litigation. In this example, the lab management functions inherent in
an enterprise clinical system could definitely help reduce these errors, but
that can only happen if the information is structured to work with those
systems. In addition to the workflow inefficiencies derived from unstructured
content, printed output opens up an organization to additional security
vulnerabilities, as it is difficult to track, and, in clinical environments,
often contains Protected Health Information.
If an organization fails to include
unstructured content when developing their information management plans, they
are missing out on a large percentage of their data, which makes up a
significant portion of their internal Enterprise Data Management.
Pulling up the anchor
The good news is that there are not
only solutions to these inefficiencies, but unstructured paper and digital
content can actually become a competitive advantage.
First, organizations must include
unstructured content in their information management roadmaps. Of course,
if an organization isn’t thinking about information management, it needs to
start. Second, as part of the process, there need to be questions asked.
Lots of questions. In the studies noted above, for example:
- Why do we have unstructured lab results coming in from our lab partners?
- Why do my users print 1381 pages per month?
Once the right questions are asked,
the answers will define your next steps.
Charting a new course
Simply asking questions about why
people are printing or why laboratories continue to fax or upload unstructured
documents will get the process started. The next step is to identify and
assemble best-of-breed technologies to solve for the previously identified
problems.
The good news for healthcare
organizations is that technologies exist to help turn unstructured content from
a liability to an advantage. For those seeking to understand why their users
are printing so much despite the heavy investments in IT infrastructure, a
variety of solutions and methodologies exist to help, either through software
or in-person assessments. Many of today’s software offerings can help
organizations map the flow of information from user to ultimate destination
providing key qualitative data (who, what, when and where). In-person
interviews can give you insight into the “why”, which ultimately leads to
changes in workflow or technology.
As for the remaining unstructured
digital content, the key to increasing its value lies in converting parts of
the content (documents, video, and audio) into structured content. Only then
can it be easily ingested by the core clinical systems, unlocking the
investment that your organization had previously made in those enterprise
systems. Intelligent Capture tools can extract the necessary information
from unstructured digital content like labs, so that it can be immediately
valuable in clinical workflows, allowing for alerts, notifications and tracking
of results in a way that’s not possible with unstructured paper results.
Anchors aweigh
Healthcare IT is busy focusing on a
multitude of technical, regulatory and competitive issues. But until there
is focus on removing the anchors associated with unstructured content from
their clinical workflows, the true ROI in their HIT investments will remain out
of reach.
For more details please contact us at:
Memphis Communications Corporation
4771 Summer Ave
Memphis, TN 38122
Tel: 901.725.9271
Fax: 901.272.3577
Toll Free: 866.805.5893
Service and Supplies: 901.257.2500
Website: http://www.memphiscommunications.net
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