Healthcare organizations worldwide are moving towards converting their patient records to electronic medical records due to HITECH Act of 2009.
According to centers for disease control and prevention, the hospitals implementing Electonic health records have shot to 90% from 10% earlier since Hitech.
The digitization of patient records opens up a new possibility of identifying and treating patient ailments using NLP methodologies. The data stored in EHR is aggregated from multiple sources, provides a complete overview of patient health, and improves healthcare.
In this blog, we will see what EMR conversion is, the best tips to implement EMR conversion, and how to automate the EMR conversion process.
Looking to automate EMR conversion? Nanonets can extract data from any kind of medical document, perform data cleaning & enhancement and sync data across your business data platforms.
Try it today (free trial) or schedule a call to learn more.
What is EMR conversion?
EMR conversion is converting paper patient medical records into electronic health records. EMR conversion involves patient data migration from paper health records to a single enterprise-wide electronic health record (EHR) system.
However, the conversion process can be complex and require significant resources and planning to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the data.
What are the benefits of EMR conversion?
EMR conversion has numerous benefits to healthcare organizations and patients both. For patients, EMR conversion and digitization of patient health record leads to the following:
- Fewer errors in medical documents
- Better healthcare
- Access healthcare data from anywhere
- Track critical illnesses over time
For healthcare organizations, EMR conversion offers a lot of benefits :
- Efficient Patient Document Management - Clinics can organize patient documents easily and create a searchable database.
- Optimize healthcare workflows: EMR keeps track of patients in real time.
- Improve patient data: EMR can link data from multiple sources thus improving the patient data quality.
- Checks Conflicting Treatments: They have safeguards that prevent treatments that may conflict.
Apart from enhanced patient care, EMR conversions have financial benefits gained from a reduction in paper record management, document archiving, and saving doctors’ time in searching documents.
Looking to automate EMR conversion? Nanonets can extract data from any kind of medical document, perform data cleaning & enhancement and sync data across your business data platforms.
Try it today (free trial) or schedule a call to learn more.
How to improve the EMR conversion process?
While EMR conversion is mandatory, you can make the EMR conversion process streamlined and simple with the following tips:
Outline The Purpose Of EMR Conversion
Specify the scope before implementing the EMR Conversion process. Gather the information about the type of data to be converted. Moreover, specify the limitations of the EMR conversion process too.
Formulate An Effective Communication Plan
The EMR conversion is a complex process that can lead to discrepancies and disruption, regardless of its execution planning. So it is essential to develop a good communication plan in which all the people who might be required to do specific tasks in the conversion process should be informed beforehand so that they get prepared.
Decide all variables in data migration
For the effective functioning of any healthcare organization, there is a need for accurate patient data. However, some flaws could lead to errors in the treatment process, such as inaccurate medical history, medications, allergies, etc. Therefore, make sure there are minimum to no errors in data migration.
Verify The Quality Of The Data
For an effective EMR conversion process, the organization should verify the quality of the data. Keep in mind to avoid conversion of any irrelevant patient data, which may lead to risk for patients.
Involve Automation platforms Early In The Extraction Process
For EMR conversion, there is a need for proper technical specifications and documentation. Involve proper document scanning software, document management, and data extraction software. You can use OCR software like Nanonets to extract data from medical documents efficiently.
Nanonets is an AI-based OCR software that can extract data from patient documents like patient registration cards, medical bills, invoices, insurance papers, and more in seconds with 98%+ accuracy.
Train The Staff Members Properly
Many healthcare institutions lack the proper training facility, and that is why there are several flaws in the EMR conversion process. The organizations should conduct adequate training for the staff members, which should be comprehensive and practical.
Assess Training Effectiveness
After the training, the organization should collaborate with the EHR vendor to set up simulations to test if the staff members have understood the system and its functionality. This should be done because the staff members should be comfortable working with the EMR system to conduct the conversion process efficiently.
Automate EMR conversion swiftly with Nanonets
Nanonets is an AI-based OCR software that can extract data from documents with 95%+ accuracy. With no-code workflows, you can simple upload patient documents and automatically sync patient data across all your platforms in real time.
The platform is HIPPA, SOC and GDPR compliant. There is on-premise and cloud hosting options too. If you have specific requirements, feel free to schedule a short call to explain us your use case, and we will automate it for you.
Try it today (free trial) or schedule a call to learn more.
Conclusion
EMR systems have been developed so efficiently in recent years and altered how patients' data is stored to help healthcare institutions adequately diagnose and monitor their progress. For efficient EMR conversion and implementation, careful planning is vital. It helps to prevent any kind of risk or damage. Planning and implementing the EMR conversion process is not easy, but if the above-given tips are kept in mind, it can be adequately accomplished.
You can simplify the EMR conversion process with Nanonets. Nanonets is AI-based no-code OCR software. It can extract data from medical documents like patient records, patient ID cards, medical reports, health certificates and more with automated OCR workflows.
If you need assistance digitizing patient records, reach out to our team for a short 10 min call.
