Making sense out of cluttered EHR data

Healthcare institutions have a growing need for solutions that allow full utilization of clinical data from within and outside of the EHR system.
imo team working on emr systems

Clean, accurate data is fundamental to maintain the integrity of information shared across the healthcare industry. IMO assists providers in cleaning up their cluttered data to improve total patient care.

The integrity of data

Hospitals are challenged to keep up with changes in requirements, coding, and the exchange of patient records across different healthcare providers. Presently, the exchange of EHR data from within the healthcare ecosystem does not work as implemented, and incorporating external data is sub-optimal. Without solutions to properly manage, organize, clean and maintain clinical data, granularity is lost during the exchange of information usually due to human or machine readability errors. The existing environment of cluttered data within EHRs raises concerns about data validity and trust, making it challenging for EHR system users to make sense of the existing disorganized information.

Clean up cluttered data

EHR systems need to be supported by solutions that align information to be utilized and shared between all users across the healthcare organization. Advances in EHR technology enable patient problem lists to be shared and managed by multiple providers across the healthcare ecosystem; however, poorly-managed problem lists are a pervasive problem that negatively impact patient safety, efficiency, and provider satisfaction. Clutter within a patient’s problem list can also undermine downstream workflows such as readmission risk, population health, analytics, and clinical decision support (CDS), keeping organizations from realizing the full value of the EHR.

Restore the integrity of data

Maintaining data integrity drives value for an organization; exchanged data tends to lose its reliability after moving throughout the healthcare ecosystem. Recording and analyzing data appropriately better informs and enables clinical and operational decisions. Specifically, patient problem lists can be a data source for predictive modeling. However, if problem lists are not clean, the results gathered from predictive modeling will mislead decisions that can impact the future of the organization. Organized problem lists with clean, maintained data can improve clinician efficiency, promote safer care, and enable more appropriate reimbursement within the EHR.

Additionally, problem lists are used in clinical decision support (CDS) from within the EHR, which filters data, looks for trends, alerts providers of any data variances, and suggests next actions to assist clinicians in delivering the best care possible. Accurate, reliable data positively impacts the healthcare organization; consistent CDS outcomes can be collected, EHR databases are better connected, and care providers work more efficiently to deliver the most effective care possible.

Leverage IMO terminology solutions

As the leading provider of medical terminology content and services to support clinical workflows in hospitals and medical offices, Intelligent Medical Objects, Inc. (IMO) recognizes the importance of developing solutions that support coding information across the healthcare industry. The IMO team works to help healthcare providers leverage high quality health information quickly and easily to improve total patient care. Currently, IMO has over 550,000 primary clinician users, however, there are countless downstream users and beneficiaries that leverage our IMO terminology solutions.

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