Today, much of the clinical data collected is often semistructured, uncoded and in effect locked away in clinical documents such as clinical correspondence, assessments or care plans. Finding information within documents is heavily reliant on clinicians to review many documents in the hope of finding the right nugget of information necessary to reason upon.
Volumes of data adding to clinician burnout
To make matters more challenging, the amount of information being captured and notes being generated has dramatically increased – and will continue to do so into the future. A recent article stated that healthcare data is projected to grow faster than in manufacturing, financial services, or media. Healthcare data will experience a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 36 percent through 2025.1
Healthcare data is presented to clinicians along with the unstated expectation that they will review each item of data and respond appropriately in the context of the patient’s overall clinical picture. This may lead to a great deal of clinician mental effort, sometimes, unfortunately, wasted if the data isn’t relevant to the current problem.
This is where the Smart Search function can help in reducing clinician frustration.
Use case of Smart Search in a Hospital Emergency Department
Let’s consider a use case in a hospital setting to showcase Smart Search’s benefits:
A patient arrives at the emergency department complaining of chest pain. The attending clinician now needs to quickly review the patient’s medical history to identify any pre-existing conditions or risk factors that may contribute to their current symptoms.
Without Smart Search, the clinician will have to manually scan various sections of the patient’s digital care record, such as their medical history, medications, lab results and imaging files.
However, with Smart Search, the clinician can simply type in relevant keywords such as “chest pain”, “cardiac arrest” or “myocardial infarction” and can retrieve all the relevant information from across the patient’s record. Smart search also provides a handy list of diagnoses extracted from the record, grouped by body system, allowing the user to quickly gain an understanding of what’s been sourced from the record and quickly filter down to sources of information.
This helps the clinician make a more informed decision about the patient’s care plan, leading to better outcomes and faster treatment.
Moreover, Smart Search can also help save time for busy clinicians who often have to navigate complex medical records and documentation. By providing a streamlined and intuitive way to search and retrieve patient data, Smart Search can improve the efficiency of healthcare delivery and help providers focus on delivering high-quality care.
Effortlessly find what matters most in your Digital Care Record
With Smart Search, clinicians can access patient data from various sources, including lab results, clinical notes, and radiology reports, in real time. Smart Search is designed to work with a wide variety of data sources, enabling indexing of federated, hybrid or aggregated health information.
When clinicians visit the search interface in the Digital Care Record, they are presented with a full list of diagnoses gathered from the patient record. Clinicians can then perform precise and detailed searches for terms which will result in the system returning synonyms (i.e. heart attack, myocardial infarction), as well as being able to carry out free text searches. By doing a quick search the clinicians don’t miss any critical information that may be buried deep in the patient record.
How can Orion Health help?
Orion Health’s Amadeus Digital Care Record provides an integrated platform that consolidates patient data across care settings, enabling enhanced care coordination and population health management. The smart search function in the Digital Care Record enables the rapid retrieval of relevant clinical information including disease/condition-specific information whilst being respectful of a clinician’s time.
If you’re interested in reducing the frustrations of your clinicians, here’s more information.
HealthITAnalytics. (n.d.). Big data to see explosive growth, challenging healthcare organizations. Retrieved from https://healthitanalytics.com/news/big-data-to-see-explosive-growth-challenging-healthcare-organizations
