Precyse Looks Ahead to Future of Health Information Management

Everything seems to be changing in the healthcare world. Physicians are now using electronic health records (EHRs) to keep track of patients, tablets and smartphones to stay in touch with their offices (and patients) wherever they go. And now a new study looks at how information management is changing, and the new strategic opportunities it may offer, in this new digital world, and also, the problems that still need to be solved.

To answer this question, Precyse, a provider of health information management (HIM) technology and services, has just released "Health Information Management in 2016: The HIM Industry's Transformative Journey to Enterprise Information Management - What Does the HIM Department of the Future Look Like?".

HIM, of course, plays a critical role in this new world of shifting from paper to electronic records. It not only is responsible for digitizing patient data and setting up EHR systems to contain it, but has moved on to advocating better patient records to freeing up access and making documentation available 24/7, to even collecting and analyzing patient data.

"Healthcare organizations are dramatically expanding their use of information to improve patient care and organizational performance," Linda L. Kloss, RHIA, Kloss Strategic Advisors, Ltd., and former CEO of the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) and author of the report, noted. "But foundational information management practices are not fully up to the demands of a digital information environment. New thinking and new learning about capturing, managing and using digital information assets is urgently needed."

As anyone who’s ever worked with data – either paper or digital – knows, it’s extremely important how material is organized and filed. The best information management systems are “intuitive.” In other words, the steps to get from Point A to Point B are logical. (I can attest to many frustrated minutes working with processes that were not!)

And this is where HIM comes in. Setting up systems that capture, store and manage the mounds of data now pouring in from everywhere, in a way that those who need it can find it easily is a tall challenge.

Precyse’s position paper sets out two possible scenarios of where HIM departments might be by 2016:

• The "Model T" -- where the base department functions and processes have had to develop many workarounds, hybrid or paper records, minimal integrations and questionable data quality, or, preferably,
• “Life in the Fast Lane," where HIM departments are working in a state of superior and optimized results and there is an enterprise approach to content and information management to ensure information assets are optimized for clinical and operational performance.

Precyse cites as an example of its successful embrace of the latter, its client, Naples Community Healthcare System (NCHS), which decreased its inpatient weekly list of patients discharged but not final-billed (DNFB) from more than $16 million to $5 million, and its outpatient DNFB from more than $14 million to under $2 million, with the system's medical record delinquency rate, which had been as high as 22 percent, now under two percent.

HIM departments nationwide have many challenges ahead. Those who will succeed will take this vital and valuable information and assimilate and transform it into permanent usable records that can be used for everything from finding new treatments for diseases to ways to crunch numbers better to reduce costs.