May 17, 2024
The Right Way to Use AI in Healthcare
by Tim Rowan, Editor Emeritus
The Problem
Home Health referral documents from physicians or hospitals can consist of more than 100 electronically transmitted pages. Some agencies report occasional packets exceeding 1,000 pages. On these pages can be a variety of data formats. Some are standard data formats such as a face sheet, but most are unstructured, consisting of images or narrations, sometimes in paragraphs, sometimes in incomplete sentences. In addition patient data interoperability can be limited by unstructured data.
More often than not, most of these pages are never read. Thoroughly interpreting that much data is nearly impossible for a human. Consequently, nurses too often approach an admission evaluation visit without a complete picture of a patient. The result can be gaps in care or treatment, inaccurate OASIS assessments, incomplete or poorly sequenced diagnosis codes, and improper care plans. These obstacles can impact both patient outcomes and agency revenue.
One Newly Available Solution
We recently attended a product demonstration and followed it up with updated descriptions to learn details about new product developments. Over the next three months, Select Data, in full disclosure one of our sponsors, will be introducing an AIpowered suite of products that has been designed over many years of development to support clinical data driven decision-making. One by one, it addresses the problems described above.
The new system, SmartCare, empowers clinicians to harness unparalleled insights, reducing bias and cognitive overload. It enables them to steer their decisions with enhanced precision while maintaining their pivotal role in patient care , eliminating one of the common reasons many administrators hesitate to invite AI into a Home Health Agency’s processes. It does, however, make the care team’s job easier and facilitates better decision-making.
- AI can read those 100 to 1,000 page referral documents in minutes , where a human may require hours.
- SmartCare uses AI to synthesize the relevant medical history to provide a focus of care snapshot highlighting the key diagnosis, focus and considerations for care, recommended OASIS clinical discipline and highlights any areas for clarification needed from physician or admitting nurse. Additionally, specific words in unstructured data such as narratives can be searched and indexed to instantly identify any inquire of the patient’s condition in an easy-to-read interface. Nurses approach the initial OASIS visit armed with all of a referring clinician’s relevant care findings.
- Recommendations for diagnostic codes strictly follow Medicare PDGM guidelines.
Suite of Tools
RISE stands for Rapid Intake Summary & Evaluation. This component of the suite summarizes all clinical data from referral sources and your EHR to provide clinically relevant diagnoses, focus of care, and recommendations for skilled disciplines. This is the part of the tool that reads referral documents and supports informed decision-making, The advantages we detected go a bit beyond the technical.
When clinicians, reviewers, coders, and office staff all have access to the same patient information, it would seem that communication among disciplines would improve and that care coordination would be enhanced. It also seems logical that continued experiences of advanced access to previously hard-to-find physician comments would gradually break through the AI fear barrier reported by so many clinicians and other professionals. We have asked Select Data to provide us with actual client experiences that would verify our assumptions.
ACE, or Admission Clinical Evaluation is SmartCare’s clinical support summary tool. It deploys AI to understand accepted OASIS assessment criteria and uses this knowledge to extract assessment and narrative data from nursing and therapy evaluations. With streamlined, pertinent data at the point of care, the entire care team has the same patient data, enabling more informed decision-making.
ACE links all patient data back to its source assessment. Doubt about the AI’s credibility should gradually diminish, even among the most AI-resistant users. Every analysis and recommendation is explained in clear language so that clinicians are likely to understand the rationale behind them. The goal is to replace every “I’m not going to let a machine tell me what to do” with ” I’ll take the information into consideration with my human insights.” We are honoring Select Data’s request to allow them to build personalized price quotes to every prospective client. They will be represented at several state and national conferences this year, or interested HHA representatives can contact EVP Ted Schulte at Ted.Schulte@SelectData.com
To learn more about SmartCare: www.selectdata.com/smartcare
For more information about SmartCare, please visit the Select Data website at www.selectdata.com or contact the company directly at (800) 332-0555. For more information, news, and perspectives from Select Data, please visit the Select Data Newsroom at www.selectdata.com/news. Web links, telephone numbers, and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Select Data’s corporate communications team at:
Media Contact
info@invadogroup.com
Phone: 800.332.0555
About Select Data
Select Data is leading the industry by leveraging the power of artificial intelligence (AI) with its SmartCare platform. Purpose-built for the challenges of post-acute care settings, SmartCare’s AI data models and natural language processing (NLP) serve up key information to full spectrum of clinical teams from field staff to coders to clinical reviewers. Whether they are leveraging Select Data’s outsourced coding services or using the SmartCare SaaS solution directly, Home Health and Hospice agencies trust Select Data to deliver high-quality coding, clinical documentation improvement (CDI), OASIS accuracy, and referral coding. With a commitment to quality and innovative data platform solutions, Select Data leads in driving successful outcomes.
www.SelectData.com