The importance of high-quality data cannot be overstated. Its impact reverberates through healthcare organizations, affecting time, resources, and patient outcomes. Consider the example from the Covid-19 pandemic, where some healthcare groups lacked access to information regarding Covid vaccine administration. This data gap caused clinicians to use valuable energy to track down patients who already received vaccinations at pharmacies or mass immunization sites, diverting their focus from those truly in need of care interventions.
These instances underscore how inadequate and poor patient data can cause gaps in care and interventions as well as extra work for physicians. Poor data can also have downstream effects that impact beyond clinician workflows as the data is used in health IT, public health, and other areas of the healthcare industry. This results in unnecessary resource efforts cleaning and sorting through the data, which can delay the implementation of solutions aimed at improving health outcomes.
The remedy, as highlighted by Jingqi Wang, Chief Technology Officer at Melax Tech, lies in the implementation of technology, such as natural language processing (NLP). In this webinar, Wang emphasized that 80% of valuable healthcare data resides in unstructured clinical notes. Leveraging NLP can help extract the value from free text and transform it into valuable, structured information that is usable in multiple applications across the healthcare industry.
Moreover, as Nate Favini, Chief Medical Officer at Forward, pointed out, the transition to value-based care models provides a compelling incentive to enhance data quality and develop innovative tools. Value-based care, with its subscription-based approach, helps encourage healthcare organizations to streamline their workflows and invest in NLP, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) solutions. These technologies can not only structure data efficiently but also support documentation, simplifying tasks such as code searches for specific medical conditions.
The combination of using technology to improve data quality and value-based care offers an exciting opportunity to elevate patient care while also simplifying workflows to reduce burnout across the industry. By embracing these advancements, the healthcare industry can unlock the full potential of patient data, drive efficiency, and ultimately enhance the overall healthcare experience.
For a deep dive into these transformative insights, watch the on-demand presentation by registering today.
