CARMEL, IN – (November 29, 2016)– Clinical Architecture is empowering providers to become more clinically aware of their patients by fully utilizing data that resides within electronic health records and clinical data repositories. With the release of Symedical 1.8.2, the most advanced terminology management platform in healthcare, providers can now leverage the newAdvanced Clinical AwarenessSuite to receive actionable insights to improve clinical decisions based on a systematic assessment of available patient information. This new offering within Symedical normalizes and analyzes disparate patient data and evaluates that data against dynamic data-driven rules to enable providers to better assess patient conditions; target at-risk populations; develop better treatment plans; and ultimately deliver improved patient care.
Managing risk for populations requires a highly informed, data-driven approach to tracking the care of patients. Today’s reality is that 63% of key clinical information about patients is missing from the coded data in Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems. The information that is available is often hard to find or difficult to interpret within the EHR. Missing, incorrect, and hard to find information in a patient’s medical record impacts care treatment plans and diagnoses made by care providers. Annually, this affects 12 million Americans, contributes to billions of dollars in costs, and can lead to the unnecessary loss of lives.
One large health system, seeking to improve the quality of their patient data and the insights available to their providers, was able to identify and confirm over 7,000 patients with undocumented high risk diseases such as diabetes mellitus type II, congestive heart failure, hypertensive disorder, and COPD using the Advanced Clinical Awareness Suite in its first six months of use. Able to work with any EHR or virtual medical record format (xCDA, FHIR, HL7, SDA), patient data sourced from three hospitals, ~100 practices, five labs, and 14 diagnostic imaging practices was fed from the health system’s HIE to the Advanced Clinical Awareness Suite at various points in the patient’s care.
In the Advanced Clinical Awareness suite patient data is normalized, intelligently summarized, and then run against appropriate inference rules. Assertions generated based on the rules can suggest diagnoses, recommend orders, calculate risk scores, provide advice, issue alerts, or build other custom actions. These assertions, relevant evidence, and dynamically built narratives that corroborate the assertions are fed back to the host system for adjudication by the provider.
Using Symedical’s Semantic Interpretation of Free Text (SIFT) for natural language processing in combination with the Advanced Clinical Awareness Suite can make the insights revealed about a patient even better. With SIFT targeted information, typically contained only in unstructured text in clinical notes, can be detected and included as discrete coded information in the patient record. As an example, the values of a patient’s left ventricle ejection fraction (LVEF) and their forced expiratory volume in the first second of expiration (FEV1) can be detected by SIFT and made available in the patient’s record to the Advanced Clinical Awareness Suite to improve the identification of un-diagnosed congestive heart failure and COPD.
Beyond identifying undocumented conditions at the point of care, the Advanced Clinical Awareness Suite can also enable healthcare organizations to:
- Maintain comprehensive, up-to-date patient problem lists
- Establish advanced clinical surveillance, making it possible to offer needed population health management services to high risk patients
- Simplify interoperability by automatically normalizing inbound patient data without the need for mapping
- Identify candidates for research or clinical trials
先进的临床认识套件任务that typically take months can now be done in hours. Providers, informaticists, and other clinical personnel within healthcare organizations can easily create, test and deploy inference rules without having to rely on a programmer (or software vendor), allowing them to quickly address specific areas of concern for their organizations. As an example, a healthcare organization could rapidly create inference rules to test for emerging threats or diseases such as the Zika virus. Using Symedical’s distribution architecture these rules could be deployed to the organization’s healthcare sites and put to immediate use to drive better outcomes and improve patient care.