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No matter how large or well-resourced a health system may be, making the right care decisions ultimately depends on its ability to exchange information with healthcare’s “digital have-nots”—organizations that weren’t eligible for EHR implementation incentives, like post-acute facilities, home health, substance use disorder clinics and assisted living facilities.
When these technology connections don’t exist, this leads to breakdowns in efficiency and communication that affect access to care, including transitions in care, leading to poor quality outcomes. Patient information pitfalls also drive up costs of care for patients and the organizations that treat them, research by the American College of Physicians (ACP) shows.
It’s an area where pragmatic solutions that leverage existing technologies to strengthen information transfer could make a substantial difference.
Increasingly, healthcare organizations are combining common tools, like digital fax, with natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) software to more fully gather shareable information through intelligent data extraction. These solutions pull needed information from unstructured documents like PDFs, scans and images and send it to clinicians and staff directly within their workflows, preventing gaps in information that may need to be data entered before care can commence, resulting in delays in treatment.