Searching EMR For Risk-Related Words Can Improve Care Coordination

Though healthcare organizations are working on the problem, they’re still not as good at care coordination as they should be. It’s already an issue and will only get worse under value-based care schemes, in which the ability to coordinate care effectively could be a critical issue for providers. Admittedly, there’s no easy way to solve care coordination problems, but new research suggests that basic health IT tools might be able to help. The researchers found that digging out important words from EMRs can help providers target patients needing extra care management and coordination. The article, which appears in JMIR Medical Informatics, notes that most care coordination programs have a blind spot when it comes to identifying cases demanding extra coordination. “Care coordination programs have traditionally focused on medically complex patients, identifying patients that qualify by analyzing formatted clinical data and claims data,” the authors wrote. “However, not all clinically relevant data reside in claims and formatted data.” For example, they say, relying on formatted records may cause providers to miss psychosocial risk factors such as social determinants of health, mental health disorder, and substance abuse disorders. “[This data is] less amenable to rapid and systematic data analyses, as these data are often not collected or stored as formatted data,” the authors note. To address this issue, the researchers set out to identify psychosocial risk fac...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: EHR Electronic Health Record Electronic Medical Record EMR EMR Analyst EMR Technology Healthcare Healthcare AI Healthcare Analytics HealthCare IT Population Health Management Value Based Reimbursement Health Data Search JMIR Medi Source Type: blogs