A recent study in the Dark Daily revealed that too many electronic alerts cause 30% of primary care physicians to overlook essential clinical laboratory test results. It seems that these physicians are getting so many alerts each day and their electronic health record systems are plagued by the issue of "Alert Overload."
The missed results in EHR's were related to information overload, electronic handoffs from one provider to another, and perceptions of poor usability of the EHR.
The research was done by a team at Debakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Houston, Texas and the study was initially reported by the Journal of American Medical Association Internal Medicine. In a survey of 2,500 primary care physicians, 29.8% of respondents acknowledged that they had missed important clinical laboratory test results that delayed patient care.
Interesting enough was the fact that the lead researcher of the study, Hadeep Singh, M.D., MPH, admitted to having missed important lab test results. In an interview with Time magazine, Hadeep said that too many alerts meant some would be missed. "If you are getting 100 emails a day, you are bound to miss a few. I study this area, and I sometimes miss emails."
Hadeep and his research team wrote that the survey findings suggested that missed results in EHR's might be related to three factors:
1) Information overload from alert noticfications
2) Electronic handoffs of care from one provider to another
3) Perceptions among providers about poor usability of the EHR
While this problem may persist for the forseeable future, labs can play a more active role in providing better actionable intelligence to physicians by leveraging specific healthcare management solutions to their providers. Through the use of a lab CRM and lab management tools that mine data from the laboratory information management system, specific business intelligence can be leveraged for the benefit of providing better patient care.
One such solution offered by hc1.com, combines lab specific CRM and Business Intelligence to better equip lab employees across sales, service and operational teams to leverage lab anaylytics in a way that has never been done before. Gone are the days of building reports using Excel spreadsheets and Crystal Reports. With hc1.com's Healthcare Relationship Management solution, real-time data is brought up into the cloud from various disparate databases (such as the LIS, general ledger, billing system, supply & inventory) to provide a 360-degree view of provider relationships.
Labs on the hc1.com platform enjoy data flow in a near real-time environment. Instead of having to repeatedly build reports week in and week out, labs enjoy their business intelligence in a dashboard environment. This advanced solution for labs allows employees from the lab to provide better actionable intelligence back to their providers or hospital staff.
Read the full Dark Daily article here.
For more on healthcare-specific business intelligence, click here.
