Currently, the healthcare marketplace is in the midst of a remarkably active period of mergers and acquisitions. Healthcare providers joining forces must carefully plan and manage the process of consolidating disparate systems to ensure clinical optimization and ongoing proper documentation. While the electronic conversion of clinical data is helpful, it has limitations, including the technical
inability to convert certain kinds of data from a legacy system to a new EHR. In healthcare, any such data error or unavailability of crucial data points could easily have a negative impact on patient care outcomes and health system business functions, and consequently, on the reputation of the provider organization.
With accuracy a chief concern, migrating the sheer volumes of patient historical records can be costly, leaving organizations struggling to balance their clinical data abstraction needs with budgetary constraints. As a physician owned company, this pain felt firsthand through their own EHR migration experience, drove the founding of MDabstract—the now leading Florida based manual data abstraction and EHR migration company.
“Our clients tell us we are “essential to their EHR conversions success” and we pride ourselves in delivering extremely accurate, standardized data migration solutions so providers and healthcare organizations can stay focused on patient care”
“It is vital that providers have accurate, usable clinical data at their fingertips. Electronic data conversions have come a very long way, but a human element is absolutely needed for the accurate placement of data in a new system, it’s needed for reconciliation, validation, and confirmation,” says Kristi Payne, COO of MDabstract. Payne points out that a human component is pivotal to carefully investigate, discern and capture data from electronically migrated as well as scanned or interfaced documentation. MDabstract has built their business around delivering these high touch manual services and coupled them with robust quality monitoring and auditing processes.
MDabstract’s overarching goal is to help each client create an EHR system that serves as the organization’s “single source of truth” and provides clinicians the data foundation needed to deliver quality patient care. The company actively collaborates with each client to understand the clinical data needed to maximize their EHR systems usability. These data points include patient-related clinical information along with those required for effective downstream business processes such as federal and payer reporting. Then, based on the format of historical data, whether scanned paper, legacy EHR or electronic push, MDabstract’s team develops a smooth migration workflow applying the client’s data governance rules. This approach facilitates the proper utilization of EHR templates while allowing providers to locate needed patient data efficiently. The company’s expert team carefully maps the location of data in the legacy sources and tailors an action plan to accurately migrate the information to the newer systems, while continually running audit processes to improve quality.
“Physicians cannot provide excellent patient care that creates optimal outcomes and be data entry clerks at the same time. MDabstract exists to take that burden off clinicians,” says Payne,” and by
providing clients with patient-specific metrics and quality measure analytics they have the tools to meet billing and reporting requirements and prove quality
successfully.”
The flexibility of their human solution has allowed MDabstract to assist data migration clients even in worst case scenarios. “Data migration is very nuanced work and there is no one-size fits-all solution,” Payne explains. In one such implementation, a client, several days before their system-wide go-live,
identified that key pieces of electronically migrated data could not be successfully converted due to an ICD mismatch between the disparate EHR systems. With an urgent phone call, MDabstract quickly formed a team of trained clinical abstractors to manually migrate the data and keep the project on track.
“Our clients tell us we are “essential to their EHR conversions success” and we pride ourselves in delivering extremely accurate, standardized data migration solutions so providers and healthcare organizations can stay focused on patient care”. With new EHR implementations showing little signs of slowing down, MDabstract is excited to see what comes next.
