HealthyData Blog | Extract Systems

As you've likely seen in prior HealthyData blogs, our software does an excellent job of pulling discrete lab result data from faxed/scanned documents and filing them into EMR via HL7. People often question how this is possible...

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.

A few things to ponder when assessing whether not your non-interfaced data is HIPAA compliant:

Is a fax of a patient’s lab results
sitting at a nurse’s station safe?

Hopefully, yes, but in reality, no...

Any “paper” lying around in a healthcare organization poses the risk of being misplaced or inadvertently made accessible to someone who should not see it. Why is it likely there then? Your staff wants the information that’s on it.  

I worked at Epic for 12 years and I'm a big fan of what they do to innovate their products to meet the needs of clinicians. However, no matter how good the Epic EMR software is, implementing an infinitely complex piece of software in an infinitely complex industry brings with it many short-comings.

Can you benefit from OCR?

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is powerful software that transforms images such as faxes and scanned documents into human readable text.  Access to this text is very powerful and can be used for many purposes.  The questions below will help you determine whether or not you could benefit from an OCR solution.

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.

I was just listening to a webinar by a reputable Health IT vendor the other day on visual security and privacy risks in healthcare.  As my company offers many ways to help with the challenges that healthcare organizations face with keeping PHI protected, I was interested in hearing what another solutions provider had to say. 

New Pagination Rules
Make Verification a Snap!

We have automated the detection of page boundaries by pagination rules, by using machine learning algorithms to set weighted values that match the expected output. This is going to streamline the pagination process and make verification even easier.

Let’s be honest. We could all use an extra hour in the day. Or two… or three… or even just 30 minutes!

In working with labs we have found one of the biggest pain points is the inability to find the time to scan or fax in lab results and manually enter the data into the EMR. This is an enormous issue, considering if these results aren’t entered into the EMR quickly and accurately, someone’s life could be in harm’s way.

I like to boast about my epic workload balancing and prioritization skills. I have researched proven methods and applied my own advice to share tips and tricks on managing time and workloads in the lab in order to be a lab powerhouse.

Have you been involved with clinical data management (CDM)?

If so, you know that following a defined and consistent process will lead to statistically sound data from clinical trials—every hospital’s dream. Part of that process may involve converting unstructured data into structured data which generally includes: