A national healthcare company leverages Apex's scalable staffing services to upgrade their enterprise EHR.
SITUATION
Our client was switching from an older electronic health record (EHR), that had over 10 years of patients’ medical history within it, to a newer one. Abstracting the medical record content required deep knowledge of the new EHR and medical terminology as converting free-form text from the older EHR into discrete and actionable data in the new one was complex manual process. Having the information abstracted in a timely manner was vital to our client since it allowed clinicians to have up-to-date records when treating patients. Our client did not have the time or resources to complete this task, so 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 the client's legacy EHR and transfer into the format used by the new EHR.
SOLUTION
We ramped up quickly and sourced a team of 40 HIM and clinical content professionals. Onboarding and training of abstractors was completed in less than two weeks; enabling the abstractors to hit full production rate within three weeks. Our EHR subject matter expert developed 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.
Delivered 40 HIM professionals who converted 160,000 charts within five months
RESULT
The total number of charts abstracted and prepped during the engagement were approximately 160,000. We met all the client’s expectations and supported their values which helped them maintain their strong relationship with their patients. Some benefits to the client as a result of our team’s work included:
- Made discrete patient data readily available in the electronic chart, which allowed care for the patient without needing to reference a paper chart, or the legacy EHR
- Made data available for review prior to seeing patients in the clinical setting, which improved provider adoption of the new EHR
- Mitigated risks to patient safety
- Patients were not burdened with having to relay or restate information that was in the older EHR
