HealthyData Blog | Extract Systems

UW Health is an integrated health system serving 618,000 patients each year in the Upper Midwest and beyond with 1,400 physicians, 16,500 employees, six hospitals, and 80 outpatient sites. UW Health is governed by the UW Hospitals and Clinics Authority Board, UW Health supports patient care, research, educations and community service missions of the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. UW Health was voted the best hospital in Wisconsin. UW Health has a large transplant program that has been serving WI for over 40 years.

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.

As our workload continues to build and technology continues to advance, it may be time to analyze your current procedures to see if an advanced OCR solution is right for you. Applying such a solution can save valuable work hours, improve turnaround times, increase transcription accuracy and yield an exceptional ROI all while streamlining your workflow. Here are four signs that you should look into an advanced OCR software solution.

Wait, is my title an oxymoron?  If data is “non-interfaced”, how can there be an interface for it?  Well, if data is not interfaced, it’s usually because of one of these two things: 

If you've read prior HealthyData blogs such as this one, then you know that we're doing some pretty "classy" things when it comes to handling your incoming documents. This includes putting those documents into the correct section of the EMR chart with nothing more than a quick once-over. This is something we're very excited about and are quite confident that it will change the way document handling is viewed by your organization.

One of the major attractions of having an EMR system is the ability to track and trend patient data. Ideally, with a click of the mouse a clinician should be able to instantly see trending lab results to influence their diagnosis.  According to a study by Mayo Clinic, 60-70 of clinical diagnoses and treatments are based off of lab results. In fact, the importance of having complete and accurate lab results in the EMR was included in step one of the Meaningful Use guidelines, as stated on HealthIT.gov.

It’s a frequent topic of conversation between us and our prospective customers.  They come to us because their quality reports are not complete… and it’s frustrating.  They are struggling to get the data they need.  Here are some examples that we often hear about:

Healthcare regulations and processes continue to change. Tools that have been adopted and adapted throughout the evolution of healthcare technology include the EHR (electronic health record) and the EMR (electronic medical record). The EHR and EMR are complementary technologies, providing more benefit together than on their own.

Document classification can mean many things depending on your use cases.  In the most basic sense, document classification means using the contents (or title) of a document to assign it a category. 

If Google can make a self-driving car why can’t external labs be automatically integrated (driven) into clinical information systems?

Recently while visiting a National Cancer Institute customer that is also a designated Comprehensive Cancer Center we had a brief chuckle regarding cutting edge technology and healthcare.  Our customer, a large academic medical center, had asked us to come and talk with other departments about expanding our clinical data extraction software to other departments. They currently use Extract to capture data from lengthy pathology reports and then import the information into their data analytics repository.