Blog

NLP: Unlocking the potential of unstructured text in healthcare

Chris.Funk@wolterskluwer.com (Chris Funk, Ph.D.) — Wed, 31 May 2017 01:05:00 GMT

Hospitals and health systems are sitting on a wealth of patient information that has potential to transform care delivery. Yet analytics infrastructures designed to fuel performance improvement have traditionally overlooked much of that data because it resides in health IT systems as unstructured free text.

Provider Friendly Terminology: A Better Problem List Strategy

Barbara.Antuna@wolterskluwer.com (Dr. Barbara Antuna) — Wed, 17 May 2017 19:34:56 GMT

How to get ahead with access to primary and secondary terms.

Problem lists are not new to healthcare, yet the industry has historically struggled to accurately capture this critical snapshot of patient problems and visit diagnoses. While EHRs now provide an efficient way to gather problem list data, they don’t address the underlying challenge of clean data capture due to the wide variance in terminologies used across the industry.

Health Language and MediMobile Partner to Improve the Hospital Revenue Cycle

brian.levy@healthlanguage.com (Dr. Brian Levy, MD) — Thu, 27 Apr 2017 14:09:14 GMT

It’s no secret that reimbursement is increasingly complex for today’s hospitals and health systems. In truth, a fair amount of billing inaccuracies and missed charge capture has always been part of the bottom-line challenge. But today’s providers simply cannot afford to let any money slip through the cracks as they navigate new value-based care models and take on more risk.

Overcoming the Complexity of Customizable Data

Thu, 02 Mar 2017 00:15:58 GMT

EMR and other healthcare software applications must maintain dropdown lists of codes, which are regularly updated by the standard bodies. As a software vendor you need to ensure that you are monitoring for updates, analyzing each update to determine what actually changed, and then incorporating the updates and shipping updated code to all of your customers. In this blog, I discuss the challenge of managing codes and dropdown lists on your own, as opposed to using a terminology management solution to manage these frequent updates for you.

Release of 2017 ISA is Good News for Interoperability

brian.levy@healthlanguage.com (Dr. Brian Levy, MD) — Wed, 08 Feb 2017 11:00:00 GMT

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) recently released the 2017 Interoperability Standards Advisory (ISA), an update to the 2016 version that holds great promise for advancing health information exchange. National Coordinator Vindell Washington hailed the release as “a key step toward achieving the goals” outlined in the Shared Nationwide Interoperability Roadmap and Interoperability Pledge announced earlier this year. Thus, the Interoperability theme continues as seen with the recent Cures Act and MIPS. Even HHS Secretary nominee Tom Price during his confirmation hearings stated that the federal government’s role “ought to be interoperability: to make sure the different systems can talk to each other so it inures to the benefit of the patient.”

The Impacts of the 21st Century Cures Act

brian.levy@healthlanguage.com (Dr. Brian Levy, MD) — Tue, 17 Jan 2017 22:14:24 GMT

The 21^st Century Cures Act was signed into law just last month. This broad law reduces the bureaucracy for drug approval, provides billions of dollars to the NIH for research, and provides funding to state governments to deal with the opioid epidemic. But along with these touted benefits, this law includes significant impacts for healthcare IT.

New Measures Increase Focus on Semantic Interoperability

brian.levy@healthlanguage.com (Dr. Brian Levy, MD) — Wed, 11 Jan 2017 15:00:00 GMT

National healthcare movements demand an interoperable framework for accurate data exchange across healthcare continuums. As value-based care continues to unfold, the industry at large remains focused on efforts to mature interoperability to support high-level quality initiatives aimed at improving population health and cutting costs.

For this reason, the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) recently identified two metrics to support specific indicators of “widespread interoperability” in the industry. Developed in response to directives laid out by The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA), the new metrics are:

Meaningful Analytics: Improving Data Integration and Quality by Leveraging the HIE Webinar Recap

brittany.johnson@wolterskluwer.com (Brian Laberge and Celest Adams -) — Wed, 30 Nov 2016 06:50:00 GMT

Healthcare organizations must achieve mastery of high-quality data and analytics to thrive within value-based care models. Today’s IT professionals are challenged to design systems that improve data exchange with industry stakeholders as well as acquire more complete and accurate patient information for quality measures reporting. Without a strategy in place that addresses each of these key areas, hospitals and health systems face significant barriers to achieving their overall population health or financial goals.

CMS Audits Raise the Bar on Patient Communication

brian.diaz@wolterskluwer.com (Brian Diaz) — Tue, 25 Oct 2016 21:00:18 GMT

Why payers need to engage consumer-friendly strategies now

Two converging trends are moving patient communication strategies front and center for today’s payers: Consumers are demanding greater control of their healthcare decisions; and regulatory movements are requiring better patient experiences.

The equation is simple. When consumers understand both the clinical and financial side of care delivery, they are equipped to make better decisions, ultimately leading to better outcomes and lower costs. Yet recent industry activity suggests that a notable gap still exists between the language that clinicians and payers use and what patients understand.

Four Reasons Healthcare Organizations Need to Simplify the Documentation of the Clinician Diagnosis Process

brian.levy@healthlanguage.com (Dr. Brian Levy, MD) — Tue, 25 Oct 2016 17:10:00 GMT

Finding and selecting the right diagnosis code is critical to both patient care and revenue cycle management. The downstream negative impact of using an unspecified code can touch everything from decision support to reimbursement, compliance, and reporting. In addition, unspecified codes are not as useful for other clinicians needing to review the records and for patients themselves as they review their own records.