The volume and variety of healthcare data are increasing. Buoyed by the pressures of the pandemic, the adoption of telehealth services has grown 38 times over the past two years to pre-COVID levels, creating a need for patients and doctors to access critical medical information on demand.
Despite these technological changes, many medical staff members still use manual data entry services. Recent research has found that 26% to 39% of healthcare workers enter data manually. Furthermore, 32% to 40% believe this is partly due to challenges in finding the needed data.
To accurately locate, access, and retrieve medical data, digitizing medical information has become the need of the hour. But the medical field generates large amounts of data, including hospitals, clinics, doctors, therapists, and medical billing companies- This makes storing data in electronic form tedious and time-consuming. Medical data includes patient and treatment details, insurance plans, claims and billing data, diagnostic information, settlement records, etc. It helps streamline administrative processes and ultimately allows for better patient care when submitted electronically.
Besides wasted time, manual processes also improve the risk of data entry errors. Let us see what this means for healthcare organizations – and what steps they can take to reduce overall risk.
What’s The Worst That Can Happen If A Data Entry Error Occurs?
For any industry, downtime and revenue are normal. For health care, the consequences can be catastrophic.
The leading cause of accidental death is medical errors or accidents. Although the overall number of these deaths is still low, they are more than any other type of accident. Data entry errors increase the likelihood of this unfortunate outcome. If a doctor or nurse uses incorrect information, their decisions will be negatively affected.
Other considerations involve missing data, such as a test result that was not entered or loaded correctly- This can lead to potential remedial issues and reduced productivity because employees must detect errors before they cause serious problems.
Healthcare organizations must consider the ongoing impact of compliance. Failure to accurately enter patient data or forgetting to enter key findings can lead to compliance audits and potential operational fines and penalties – as long as operations meet due diligence expectations.
A Four-step Data Processing Scheme
Four general steps can assist minimize the risk of manual data entry errors:
Identify Critical Data Sources
Not all healthcare data needs the same level of scrutiny and security. For example, basic patient information—such as name, address, and date of birth—must be protected. Every effort must be made to ensure accurate records, where minor errors cannot lead to serious health complications. Meanwhile, allergy, test results, and medical history information should always be complete and accurate to ensure doctors to take the best decisions for their patients.
Automate Key Processes:
The vast amount of healthcare data being generated, processed, and stored now means that even experienced data entry teams can’t keep up. As a result, companies must deploy automated data collection and entry solutions to verify essential information and ensure it is available to the right employees at the right time.
Integrate Critical Processes:
Employees continue manually entering data because of legacy technology throughout the healthcare sector – databases, servers, and front-end solutions that are outdated but rooted in familiar processes. While eliminating these technologies may not be possible, exploring new tools that can integrate with existing methods is worthwhile to reduce overall complexity.
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Leveraging Outside Help:
The sheer volume, variety, and speed of generated healthcare data makes accessing it effectively and achieving accuracy a daunting task. Here, HIPAA-certified third-party providers can help organizations find and deploy solutions that work with existing systems to reduce data entry errors.
Presenting Prospective Healthcare Data
More than 90% of hospitals and healthcare providers are now using electronic medical records and electronic record systems to simplify data management. Simply adopting these systems is not enough. Organizations should create and deploy processes that minimize the need for manual data entry and transformation to use these systems best and provide the best possible care.
It starts with data identification and automation and is enhanced by integration with the help of a trusted third-party provider. As a result, you significantly reduce the risk of data entry errors, freeing up staff time to do what matters most: improving patient outcomes.
Who Can Provide The Best Medical Data Entry Services?
We, Perfect Data Entry, one of the leading outsourcing of healthcare data entry, offer cost-effective, fast, secure, and accurate medical data entry services. We bring together the best tools, technology, and people to provide unparalleled medical data entry services. Also, we can deliver support services within a fast turnaround time. You canuse our medical data entry services and gain operational efficiency and achieve better ROI by focusing on your core competencies. We extract and store data and capture data on various healthcare records. Call us today!
