Importance of Medical Data Entry in Patient Care and Physician Compliance

Though their healthcare data is an extremely valuable asset, most people don’t realize this. Health information that is properly managed can be better integrated into the treatment and care that is provided by hospitals and medical practices. Accurate patient data is a key factor in improving outcomes. It’s therefore hardly surprising that efficient medical data entry services that improve the value of patient information are always in demand. These services have now become all the more important and crucial with ICD-10 requirements. Medical data will only get more complex with regulatory changes and it’s important for patients as well as healthcare providers to realize the value and full implications of the information.

Accurate Healthcare Data Improves Care

An individual’s healthcare data enables clinicians to provide better care, improving patient satisfaction and outcomes. Records that are comprehensive and accurate can result in better diagnoses and appropriate treatment. However, experts believe that much of healthcare data is never used. It is estimated that around 80% of the data remains in semi-structured or free-text form, in the manner it was created at the point-of-care. Such data is never used and provides no value.

That isn’t quite the ideal way forward. That’s where professional medical data entry experts can help. They capture all clinical data required to manage patients according to best practices by efficiently entering data into the health information Their valuable support includes collecting data from various sources, maintaining electronic records and logs, running reports, and archiving.

Making Healthcare Data more Useable

To reduce the burdensome task of managing healthcare data, industry experts offer useful suggestions on how to make that information more usable.

• Interoperable Technology for Dealing with Complexity

Complexity is only set to increase with healthcare data. Multiple sources need to be handled including offices, hospitals, clinics and pharmacies. With the changes in the regulatory environment, patient data has become voluminous, inconsistent, and available in structured or unstructured formats. This complexity often causes inaccuracies and mistakes in the medical records. Interoperable technology is necessary for analyzing and managing this health data so that its value is not lost. In such a scenario, patient access to health data is important as it would empower them and positively contribute to their health.

• Need to Minimize Data Errors

Data errors seep into the health records, with 20% to 50% error rates in medical coding. Physicians also find data entry into electronic health records quite cumbersome and time-consuming. Mistakes occur in sub-classifications of the patient’s condition, which also results in the wrong treatment and further compounding of the error in the health record, making the data unreliable and unable to provide truthful insights.

• Faster Processing through High Tech Systems Needed

It is estimated that physicians create around 2 billion clinical reports and notes every year. However, most healthcare organizations do not have the staff numbers to process such large volumes of data. Processing doesn’t involve only going through the data, but also extracting, validating and normalizing it.

Hospitals and practices must replace conventional technology with new systems that can carry out the processing faster and transform large data volumes to real-time analytics to be used at the point-of-care. Only this would help prevent mistakes and overlapping of reports which translates to better care for patients. Conventional data capture processes make the data unusable beyond medical billing.

• Prompt Reporting of Critical Findings

Another major issue is that critical findings still do not get reported. Automated notification systems need to be set in place in hospitals and other healthcare organizations so they can be alerted of critical findings. However, many healthcare organizations do not have such systems in place, which means critical results from radiology reports, diagnostic imaging, etc., are still not notified on time.

Without such systems, providers still rely on manual processing of large volumes of records. Apart from consuming a significant amount of time, manual processing is also error-prone and often leads to communication failures or delays, which causes legal issues. This significantly hampers treatment, even with serious long-term effects. These repercussions could be avoided if the hospital or healthcare facility has a system of automatic patient notification.

Using Healthcare Data to Improve Workflow

Doctors must understand that healthcare data plays a crucial role in improving workflow. The use of EMRs (Electronic Medical Records) has been mandated since 2014 by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. EMR use has been a matter of complaint for many doctors, primarily because of the attention they have to divide between examining patients and entering data. Otherwise they would have to enter data after patient consultations, which would extend their working hours. Data entry outsourcing can help hospitals and clinics focus on their core processes and also enable the data process to be more integrated into their functioning.

Technology can deal with such issues and improve workflow, along with optimization of patient outcomes. Hospitals and physicians must find a way to maintain this balance. There are also solutions to facilitate interoperability with existing systems in your practice. The right health IT solutions can enable mitigation of many of these challenges and make healthcare data a true asset for hospitals and practices.

MOS (Managed Outsourced Solutions) is a leading business process outsourcing provider that supports small to large companies across the US with document conversion, document scanning, data processing, and data entry services.