Author: Dr Shane Brown
Whilst the new world of digitally-enabled healthcare has introduced new practices, processes, and data sources, it has also created care sector siloes that are independently creating significant volumes of information.
With significant amounts of complex data now being generated, teamed with increased expectations around health care, Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) have gone from being an innovative investment to a necessity.
In fact, EMRs have become a critical component of healthcare reform around the world. As the industry becomes more connected and data-driven, EMR’s are playing an increasingly vital role in providing greater accuracy and efficiency when treating patients.
Despite this need, there are significant discrepancies in the way data is stored, managed and integrated which greatly inhibits the effectiveness of EMRs. As a result, most EMR’s only present a partial view of a patient’s medical history and condition, and still require considerable amounts of manual data collation, review and interpretations.
Increased patient expectations, resource pressures and accelerated investments in digital healthcare has created a greater need for more sophisticated EMRs that can deliver a holistic view of patients to clinicians to enable faster and better treatment.
So how can hospitals make the most of their EMR investment? Even if all the patient data is captured in the one place, who has the time to read it?
Clinical expert intelligence systems enable hospitals and clinicians to get the most out of their EMR investment by automating the process for collecting, analysing and interpreting patient information, to deliver the best possible therapy and management recommendations, all in real-time.
It can apply expert knowledge to patient data to provide treatment management advice based on any data within an EMR, and where some data is not consolidated, it can even query external data sources to supplement that information.
Clinical expert intelligence systems can integrate and interrogate patient information from multiple sources, with a knowledge base that relies on “rules” created by clinicians to replicate their unique, decision making process.
By removing bottlenecks such as those created by manual gathering of missing patient information, a clinical expert intelligence system can deliver the most intelligent and comprehensive analysis of all patient information, at scale and with absolute accuracy.
Clinical advice is then delivered in patient-specific formats such as clinical assessments, care recommendations or alerts for critical conditions. This not only reduces the need for manual consolidation, analysis and recommendations, it can improve the quality of treatment recommendations, and reduce bed stays for patients.
Clinical expert intelligence is an innovative way for EMRs to become smarter, and for clinicians to turn disparate data silos into actionable intelligence that ultimately delivers better patient outcomes.