HealthyData Blog | Extract Systems

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.

What is data abstraction?

Abstraction is the process of reviewing large or small data sets or documents for information that will be needed in the future for decision making. The crux of the problem is having domain knowledge that allows one to accurately and swiftly sift through the important from the unimportant.

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. Even the smallest of violations of HIPAA can harm patients and tarnish trust, according to this article Small Violations of Medical Privacy Can Hurt Patients and Erode Trust by Charles Ornstein at NPR.org.

The British are coming! The British are coming!

This isn't a blog about the Battles of Lexington and Concord with Paul Revere’s famous quote… but this is equally as important as that fateful night.

The British, Chinese, Iranians, Russians, eastern Europeans—and probably the US government too—are all coming to a database near you.  They are systematically gathering data about all of us.  No bit of data is too small because it could be a critical piece of the puzzle that connects all of the seemingly unimportant information they’ve already collected on you.  Imagine creating a digital picture of you, one pixel at a time.  Get it?  No wait, they’ve got it.

Shocking? Yes.  New?  Not even close.

The headline Medical Errors are the Third Leading Cause of Death is a popular title for a recent study that highlights the impact diagnostic errors can have on patients.

A web search turned up similar headlines every few years going back to the 1990’s. Clearly, not much has changed.  There are still too many diagnostic errors and not enough has been done to reduce the carnage. 

When you get to the office in the morning, is there a backlog of lab results waiting to be entered in patients’ electronic medical records for you and your team?  If so, then read on…

Were you thinking of the word dread?  Or how about, “I hate it when…

I recently spent three days driving across the northern Midwestern States and through a good part of Canada with a longtime friend as we headed to a once-in-a-lifetime wilderness adventure.  As you might imagine our conversations spanning those 72 hours took as many twists and turns as did the roads we traveled.   However, one saying my friend repeated several times stood out among many insightful remarks he’d made, “Your judgement is only as good as your information.“

With the final days of 2015 upon us, I would like to thank Extract’s customers and colleagues for your support and engagement this year. It’s been a significant year for our company which I’ll boil down by sharing two exciting milestones:

• Our solutions auto-captured more than 5 million lab test components for our customers. This number has grown exponentially and that growth will continue in 2016.
• We developed a Pathology data extraction solution that captures more than 400 fields from pathology reports across 8 different disciplines and converts unstructured data into relevant, discrete information for research.

I’m inspired by our customers’ passion for pursuing better patient outcomes while constantly looking for new ways to reduce the cost of healthcare delivery in this country. Nearly every day I notice anew how our accomplishments are tied to our customers’ drive for innovation. I’m grateful for their willingness to share their stories and reveal healthcare data gaps.

Cleveland Clinic is opening up the patient file, as in the entire patient file, to their patients. I’d like to have been a fly on the wall listening to the arguments in favor and against. Current wisdom seems to be “more information is better”. But I wonder.