The following is a guest article by Isaac Ellis, Director of Business Development at Healthcare Triangle.
To deliver the highest quality care and close care gaps for their patient community, providers need the right data at their fingertips and at the point of care. However, healthcare systems today face numerous challenges in delivering on that need. With vast amounts of patient data generated daily from disparate sources in myriad forms, processing that data and pairing the right information with the right patients serves as a roadblock. It’s a roadblock that can not only reduce the availability of data at the point of care, this reduction in efficiency can prevent staff from focusing on higher value activities and increase costs.
In fact, six in 10 healthcare leaders say their organization struggles with incomplete and poor-quality data. This is a struggle that the team at Monument Health understood all too well. Based in Rapid City, the healthcare system serves 12 communities across western South Dakota. With five hospitals, 38 medical clinics and specialty centers and over 5,000 physicians and caregivers, Monument Health’s mission to make a difference, every day, means that closing care gaps takes high priority.
The data trap that generates care gaps
Yet, the system’s ability to close those gaps was being limited by the thousands of pages of data that Monument Health ingests daily from multiple sources in various forms, including faxes, unstructured reports, and PDFs. Each required staff to manually identify, categorize, and upload it into the correct patient’s electronic health record (EHR), so the data could be delivered to providers at the point of care.
Monument Health was facing a struggle common to healthcare systems across the country—how to most effectively and efficiently manage this information, while ensuring data security. However, the health system knew that this was an area where digital transformation could make a substantial difference. That’s why they went all in to strengthen data capture and retrieval, turn up their investments in data analytics, make the move to cloud-based data security, and hone in on data-based innovation.
Turning clinical data from disparate sources into actionable insight
Due to their data management and security needs, along with the paper-intensive nature of their workflow, Monument Health required an advanced automation solution for image recognition and document analysis. Additionally, to improve data capture and drive better patient care, they recognized the value of leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP).
All of this led Monument Health to choose Healthcare Triangle’s cloud-based AI and machine learning readabl.ai solution. The AI-powered solution is designed to automate the process of categorizing data from unstructured reports and pair the right information with the right patients. Leveraging state-of-the-art public cloud artificial intelligence and machine learning to recognize and extract information from documents, faxes and narrative reports, readabl.ai also offers the added values of identification of discreet data within the documents using NLP to understand context and automation to act.
Strategic approach offers benefits to patients, providers and healthcare system
For Monument Health, the move to stay ahead of the curve of the digital healthcare transformation paid off. With their new automation solution, documents were processed in less than three minutes, with a roughly one-third reduction in effort per document. For over 81% of documents, documents were categorized and patients identified automatically by readabl.ai.
Overall, Monument Health achieved a number of important benefits, including:
- Streamlined patient care through faster processing
- Cost reduction through labor savings
- Integration with the EHR & other key applications using FHIR APIs
- Accuracy through the latest AI and language processing models
- Scalability through the public cloud
The approach has also enabled Monument Health to focus on higher-value activities related to patient care rather than document processing, positioning the integrated healthcare system to meet the complex health needs of its population more effectively.
Key takeaways from Monument Health’s success
The ability to achieve digital innovation is dependent on capturing and analyzing data from disparate sources, using the data to understand individuals’ unique health needs and modernizing technology infrastructure to enable next generation use cases. In all of these areas, Monument Health’s success offers a roadmap for the future of healthcare systems.
It’s time for healthcare organizations to strengthen data capture by automating paper-based data retrieval and applying AI and natural language processing to intelligently extract information from faxes, scanned documents and narrative text. Healthcare leaders must also drive investments in data analytics and move to a public cloud to bolster data security and management. Finally, through the exploration of cloud-based data analytics and connection of disparate data sources for more powerful insights, healthcare systems can hone in on data-based innovation.
Digital innovation is happening, and leaders must develop a more strategic approach to achieve the required digital transformation to support this innovation. Luckily, Monument Health has shown us the way. It’s not as complex as perceived. You just need to take the first step.
