Ensuring Healthy EHR Databases for Providers

Original Artilce Published in the South Florida Hospital News And Healthcare Report 

Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems are designed to improve patient care by tracking, accounting for care over time, and enable sharing health records with other providers as needed and approved by the patient.

For all of that to occur, the patient health record, the actual “data” within the patient record needs to be “accurate” or “healthy data.” It is essential that the data entered and stored is accurate.

MED-DETECT, DUOLARK’s software solution, provides a way to find errors, and once corrected, will continuously validate the accuracy of the core Patient Health Records.

While assisting a south Florida based Hospital system undergo a complete technology refresh two years ago, Karl Norris, founder and software architect of MED-DETECT, identified some really critical areas of need within that hospital’s EHR implementation and helped to solve those errors.

“In the process, he realized the problems identified and solved were universal,” Norris says, “All hospitals that use modern EHR systems have some recurring problematic database issues. We devised a way to systematically resolve the problems and keep them resolved.”

Most patient information is trusted, however little is verified after it has been entered. It is checked again at the point of service and annotated. Norris, who has a tenured background in accounting and internet information security, strongly feels it is okay to “trust” but you must also “verify” to be accurate.

“We find healthcare entities around the country are struggling to up with information integrity,” says Norris. “As soon as they clean up a record, another record is already compromised. Over time it gets worse and the longer correction takes, the more expensive it becomes.”

MED-DETECT is available as a subscription based solution or installed onsite. It is designed to detect, alert and correct hard to find errors in healthcare databases and impacts over 20 financial ratios in healthcare. It eliminates redundant staff work, effectively accelerates remediation efforts, and provides a unique efficiency day one. MED-DETECT also logs all errors and catalogues issues based on the way the healthcare organization operates.

Certified healthcare consultants and data scientists provide direction on how to correct errors, and provide solutions to prevent them from recurring. MED-DETECT works the way you do— it maximizes your efficiency to ensure data integrity.

It pays for itself, stresses Norris. One hospital CEO that Norris has worked with over the past year says the value the product may bring to the bottom line of their hospital is about one extra month of net revenue due to the efficiencies gained throughout the entire hospital system.

“Our customer is anyone using an EHR application who desires faster, more complete financial reimbursement,” explains Norris. “It validates accuracy of data in their EHR; assures patients that their digital identity is kept safe and healthy; and provides the accurate patient record to the correct provider at the correct place in time. Our impact is across the continuum of healthcare and we have the ability to fingerprint the data once it is verified, and keep track of it. This facilitates the ability to share data, trust it, verify it and monitor it for accuracy”.

Norris also touts immediate results—not weeks or months, but within a few hours. An aware staff currently tasked to clean it up can immediately and intuitively use the solution with little or no training.

“It’s fast and it’s easy and it gives you the ability to fix EHR databases with pinpoint accuracy starting with the worst record first,” he says. “This is brand new technology and it’s a first in the healthcare industry. It’s changing the world for the people who are using it.”

Norris adds, “We also provide quality of care measurements. One goal is to ensure accurate patient counts. The more accurate data the more accurate reports and the benefits skyrocket from there. If you cannot trust the data, how can you trust the results?”

Pricing is based on a matrix since there are different factors that the company uses to determine the overall fees. But a no-cost, no obligation demo of the product is available.

“The only way to understand what MED-DETECT is to see it work,” says Norris. “If we have 1,000 records, we can provide a real probability of what’s in the rest of your database in less than 30 minutes.”