One of the main battles to efficient healthcare is complicated and incompatible medical records systems. Health Fidelity, a health IT startup funded by UPMC, has developed a vendor-neutral tool to solve the data acquisition problem called HF360 Data Acquisition. HF360 Data Acquisition is a flexible platform that healthcare providers and health plans can use to retrieve medical records and other patient data in the most efficient and cost-effective manner.
The platform can acquire both structured and unstructured clinical data in an EHR-agnostic manner, dramatically lowering the cost of medical record retrieval. It is currently available for use with Health Fidelity’s industry-leading HF360 Risk Adjustment suite. It enables risk-bearing entities to manage the collection of all types of patient data required for risk adjustment, including administrative and financial data (e.g., claims, CMS/HHS files, enrollment, eligibility) as well as clinical data (e.g., physician narratives in medical records, lab results, vital signs).
The centerpiece of the HF360 Data Acquisition platform is a proprietary medical record retrieval technology that can securely extract patient records from all major EHRs with no disruption to providers. With a simple upload of a patient roster, the platform locates and abstracts the appropriate medical records without additional human intervention. This light-touch and highly scalable approach requires far less resource investment than a full EHR integration and allows organizations to decrease chart retrieval costs by 80 percent.
“Medical record retrieval is the single biggest inefficiency in healthcare technology. Health plans and healthcare providers are not able to optimally manage patient risk without spending a significant amount of money in acquiring and sharing data,” said Health Fidelity CEO Steve Whitehurst in a statement. “With our new data acquisition platform, we enable providers and payers to focus on managing patient risk without having to worry about the significant expense of medical record retrieval.”
Mount Sinai Health Partners, a clinically integrated network serving over 250,000 patients in the New York City metropolitan area, recently leveraged HF360 Data Acquisition to automate the retrieval of EHR records for review. “By leveraging the Health Fidelity platform to acquire data from Epic, we achieved an amazing ROI while minimizing the effort on our IT resources and bypassing the normally painful process of extracting provider notes out of our EMRs via classic ETL tools,” said Mike Berger, Vice President, Population Health Informatics and Data Science, “Health Fidelity has shown tremendous innovation in bringing data science techniques like NLP together with classic technologies like OCR to solve real business problems related to risk-adjustment, improved documentation and novel data management.”
Additionally, HF360 Data Acquisition supports other secure methods of retrieving medical records such as HL7 and print, scan or fax-based abstraction. Other key capabilities of HF360 Data Acquisition include:
– Real-time visibility into the data acquisition progress that shows how many medical records have been targeted and retrieved.
– Centralized data storage that enables the creation of comprehensive, longitudinal member profiles that can span multiple years, allowing for the most accurate patient views and analytical insights
– Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology for printed, scanned and faxed documents.
– Ability to easily export retrieved records for use in multiple functions such as risk adjustment and quality/HEDIS
