Searching EMR For Risk-Related Words Can Improve Care Coordination

Though healthcare organizations are working on the problem, they’re still not as good at care coordination as they should be. It’s already an issue and will only get worse under value-based care schemes, in which the ability to coordinate care effectively could be a critical issue for providers.

Admittedly, there’s no easy way to solve care coordination problems, but new research suggests that basic health IT tools might be able to help. The researchers found that digging out important words from EMRs can help providers target patients needing extra care management and coordination.

The article, which appears in JMIR Medical Informatics, notes that most care coordination programs have a blind spot when it comes to identifying cases demanding extra coordination. “Care coordination programs have traditionally focused on medically complex patients, identifying patients that qualify by analyzing formatted clinical data and claims data,” the authors wrote. “However, not all clinically relevant data reside in claims and formatted data.”

For example, they say, relying on formatted records may cause providers to miss psychosocial risk factors such as social determinants of health, mental health disorder, and substance abuse disorders. “[This data is] less amenable to rapid and systematic data analyses, as these data are often not collected or stored as formatted data,” the authors note.

To address this issue, the researchers set out to identify psychosocial risk factors buried within a patient’s EHR using word recognition software. They used a tool known as the Queriable Patient Inference Dossier (QPID) to scan EHRs for terms describing high-risk conditions in patients already in care coordination programs.

After going through the review process, the researchers found 22 EHR-available search terms related to psychosocial high-risk status. When they were able to find nine or more of these terms in the patient’s EHR, it predicted that a patient would meet criteria for participation in a care coordination program. Presumably, this approach allowed care managers and clinicians to find patients who hadn’t been identified by existing care coordination outreach efforts.

I think this article is valuable, as it outlines a way to improve care coordination programs without leaping over tall buildings. Obviously, we’re going to see a lot more emphasis on harvesting information from structured data, tools like artificial intelligence, and natural language processing. That makes sense. After all, these technologies allow healthcare organizations to enjoy both the clear organization of structured data and analytical options available when examining pure data sets. You can have your cake and eat it too.

Obviously, we’re going to see a lot more emphasis on harvesting information from structured data, tools like artificial intelligence and natural language processing. That makes sense. After all, these technologies allow healthcare organizations to enjoy both the clear organization of structured data and analytical options available when examining pure data sets. You can have your cake and eat it too.

Still, it’s good to know that you can get meaningful information from EHRs using a comparatively simple tool. In this case, parsing patient medical records for a couple dozen keywords helped the authors find patients that might have otherwise been missed. This can only be good news.

Yes, there’s no doubt we’ll keep on pushing the limits of predictive analytics, healthcare AI, machine learning and other techniques for taming wild databases. In the meantime, it’s good to know that we can make incremental progress in improving care using simpler tools.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

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