Scattered EHR Data Hides Cancer Risk
The Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association is reporting that clinicians may be missing actionable risk factors for certain types of cancer because the information is spread throughout patients’ medical records. The study found that factors related to heritable breast or ovarian cancer met national guidelines for genetic risk evaluation in eight percent the women studied, but half of them weren’t referred for the evaluation.
The researchers noted that “The full story of a patient’s risk for heritable cancer within their record often does not exist in a single location. It is fragmented across entries created by many authors, over many years, in many locations and formats, and commonly from many different institutions in which women have received care over their lifetimes.”
All the necessary information was present in the EHR, but the time it took researchers to piece it together to show that a patient meets referral guidelines was significantly longer than the time a clinician would have to review a chart. Things weren’t helped by the fact that many of the risk factors, like family or personal history with cancer tended to be included in a narrative section of the patient’s file.
The researchers suggested that artificial intelligence, particularly natural language processing, could help to better identify these risk factors. To be clear, advancements in this type of AI aren’t intended to replace clinicians, but to supplement them with additional information that can improve patient care.
A large reason that information regarding things like the mentioned genealogy history don’t make it into the specialized modules intended for them is that clinicians just don’t have the time. Sometimes this information isn’t even gathered, but when it is, it’s put into a patient’s file as expeditiously as possible to keep up with the demands of the workday.
The thing with important data, is that it has to be accurate to be of any use, regardless of how it’s presented to someone. Extract’s products help to take information that’s incoming to a healthcare system and automatically enter it in the EHR. By reducing manual data entry, the quality of the data is improved, and by sending the information directly to where it belongs, clinicians need less time to find what they’re looking for.
If you’d like to learn more about how our document automation software works, please reach out.
