Ed Stevens on the 3 most pressing challenges in Health Information Management

As we expand our offering and solutions for the healthcare segment, we are delighted to continue this journey with a true expert: Ed Stevens has joined ScaleHub as Director of Product Management – Global Healthcare Solutions. Along with a warm welcome, we asked Ed to sit down with us and discuss the top challenges health information management (HIM) teams are facing.

His expertise and vast knowledge gives him (and now us!) unique insights into the healthcare tech industry including AI-based cloud processing for patient data-related automation. Ed’s more than three decades with Cerner (now Oracle Health), and his knowledge of healthcare processes across the many care venues, align perfectly with ScaleHub’s vision: to help HIM professionals achieve ultimate scalability for healthcare document processing, with 100% data accuracy in as little as an hour.

Paper-based record processing, resource shortages, interoperability

To dive right in, we asked Ed to list the three biggest challenges in HIM today. Here are his insights:

Challenge 1: Improving the efficiency of paper-based record processing in HIM

Medical record processing and management are key to a timely posting and completion of patient record information in order to ensure the best possible care, availability of information, and accessible data for insightful analytics. Did you know for example, that 43% of rural hospitals still exchange medical records via fax and postal service (paper) mail? (You’ll find some more disconcerting numbers here).

It’s not difficult to imagine how that affects the complete continuum of care—from patient care to productivity, financial aspects and compliance. Therefore, the adoption of technology and services to bridge the paper-to-digital gap in medical records and to augment the current shortage of available resources needs to be addressed urgently.

Challenge 2: Lack of resources across healthcare organizations

Too few resources affect the entire healthcare process. Whether a breakdown of patient care services, missing data for doctors to review and analyze, or delayed processing of patient records: all of this can negatively affect the care process, the patients and the long term financial health of an organization.

Happy patients will return to a health organizations for their healthcare needs. However, if there are breakdowns in the process which lead to patient dissatisfaction, then doctors don’t have patients—and then the organization doesn’t have revenues to keep facilities open.

Technology solutions that augment current resources can help to reduce current workloads significantly and enabling the support of remote workers can ease the pain of staff shortages for many HIM organizations. ScaleHub’s cloud based solutions offer advanced automation and the ability to bring humans in the loop from anywhere in the world to provide a positive increase in the size of the resource pool for any data processing-related tasks.

HIM organizations could realize significant benefits by utilizing these resources to free up doctors, nurses and administrative staff. This would potentially be adding time for them to provide additional care to their patients.

Challenge 3: Interoperability – exchanging medical record information securely

Just recently, in July, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information technology (ONC) released the new version 4 of the United States Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI v4), laid out in the latest version of ONC’s Health IT Standards Bulletin.

The USCDI is a standard developed and adopted by the on behalf of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). It sets the technical and policy foundation for access, exchange, and use of electronic health information to support nationwide, interoperable health information exchange. USCDI v4 now includes 20 additional data elements and a new data class.

For healthcare organizations and solutions providers alike the continuous evolution of the standard means they have to adapt quickly to never-ending new requirements. Because what makes perfect sense for patients and healthcare facilities—having the full medical history available—may prove a headache in term of technical implementation. While secure, consented access to existing medical history must become the standard not the exception, safe and agile methods must be put in place to realize this goal.

The benefits are clear: Patients get the appropriate care. Physicians are enabled to provide the best possible care with complete knowledge of the patient’s history. And management can reduce organizational exposure to costly risks when care is provided without all the background information needed to treat patients safely.

Learn more about Ed Stevens

Does what Ed discusses above sound familiar? To learn more about our solution for medical records processing and how ScaleHub can help your healthcare organization to safely bridge the gap from paper to digital, watch the video below and contact us to schedule a demo with one of our experts.