A national healthcare company abstracts and migrates its electronic health records to a new system.
SITUATION
Our client was switching from an older electronic health record (EHR) that had over 10 years of medical history within it to a newer one. A significant portion of the content was unable to be electronically converted into the new EHR. Abstracting the medical record content required deep knowledge of the new EHR as converting free-form text from the older EHR into discrete and actionable data in the new one was a time consuming and thought-intensive manual process. Our client did not have the time or resources to complete this task; they partnered with Apex to deploy a team of 40 health information management (HIM) and clinical professionals over a period of five months, to manually abstract the information from client's legacy EHR and transfer into the format used by the new EHR.
Converted 160K charts manually within five months
Apex ramped up quickly and sourced a team of 40 HIM and clinical content professionals. We onboarded and trained abstractors in less than two weeks; enabling the abstractors to hit full production rate within three weeks. We leveraged our subject matter expert Gordon Lashmett to develop the workflow used by the team to perform this abstraction process in a structured and orderly manner. Apex managed the team throughout the engagement to assure production targets were met and quality review standards were followed.
RESULT
The total number of charts abstracted and prepped during the engagement was approximately 160,000, with an average time of 20 minutes per chart. The accuracy of the abstractions performed by Apex was recognized routinely. We met all client expectations and supported their values which helped them maintain their strong relationship with their patients. Benefits to the client included:
- Made discrete patient data readily available in the electronic chart, which allowed providers and staff to care for the patient without needing to reference a paper chart or the legacy EHR
- Made data available to clinicians for review and reporting on prior to being seen in the clinical setting, which improved provider adoption of the new EHR
- Allowed triggering of decision support alerts related to the information entered during abstraction
- Allowed for faster decommissioning of the older EHR
- Mitigated risks to patient safety
- Provided continuity of care for the duration of the project
