Meeting consumer expectations in a hybrid health IT landscape Patients are increasingly expecting a fast, smooth, digitaldriven experience with their healthcare providers that resembles what they can do in other aspects of their lives, says Royston Adamson-Green of NextGate
O
ne-click shopping, locationbased services, and automatic account recognition are the norm in the consumer world, creating frustration among patients who wonder why healthcare seems so far away from catching up. Despite the best efforts of dedicated information management professionals,
health systems are rife with data integrity errors, leading to poor experiences and higher costs. Experts commonly cite duplicate health record rates of around 20 per cent in U.S. health systems, leading to $2000 per patient in unnecessary or repeated medical expenses, totalling $6 billion annually. A combination of suboptimal technologies, human error, and the
fundamentally complex nature of patient information is to blame. Today’s hybrid IT environment demands that healthcare leaders engage in more comprehensive patient record matching and identification approaches. While electronic health records (EHRs) have become commonplace, the disjointed, competitive nature of systems within a typical healthcare organisation contributes to an influx of duplicate, fragmented and disparate data. Patient matching functionalities within EHRs often lack the complexities to unify information from external systems. Poorly designed systems that fail to integrate or communicate with one another exacerbate inefficiencies, generating millions of duplicate and incomplete records that lead to patient safety errors, skewed reporting and analytics, administrative burdens, and lost revenue. While most data entry errors are preventable, lack of an enterprise patient
56
HWM_003 - NextGate.indd 56
17/01/2022 20:40
