Improving accreditation, certification and quality improvement programs through automated abstraction of electronic health data.

ABSTRACT SBIR Phase IReduce the burden of data abstraction for certificationaccreditation and quality improvement programs via a new platform to automate the abstraction of measures and a novel interface to improve human abstractor workflowThe broad impact commercial potential of this SBIR Phase I project is to drive down the burden of participation in quality improvement programsspecificallythe resource intensive manual data abstraction process to derive and report quality measures that are instrumental to improving health outcomes and controlling costsPatient Insight proposes improvements through automated abstraction methods and an interface for human abstractors to better visualize electronic health recordEHRdata and complete their workThe existing approach is a barrier to broader uptake of quality improvement initiatives such as accreditationPatient Insight s proposed solution consists of leveraging both proven and proprietary technologies to extract data via EHR agnostic application programming interfacesAPIsbetter target eligible patientsand calculate measures via natural language processingNLPalgorithms and custom queriesThe core innovation is a novel data mining engine and user interface that improves the process of human data abstraction for clinical and quality documentation such as those required to achieve accreditationThe proposed project will allow Patient Insightin partnership with the American College of Cardiologya leader in the hospital based accreditation spaceto develop a proof of concept pilot project at a select hospital and compare human and automated data abstraction methods for a pre selected number of measures that are mandated as part of the ACC s Heart Failure Accreditation programOnce completedPatient Insight will expand on the technologydesign and user research data requirements with a roadmap for product enhancements for Phase II that will enable the building of a commercially viableadd onservice for sites participating in the ACC s suite of accreditation programs and eventually expand to additional ACC service lines as well as other accreditation and certifying bodiesSuccess will represent a transformative change in general purpose abstraction and an interface that will support a broad array of accreditation measures and abstraction workflows thereby solving a critical inefficiency both clinically and financially for hospitals while improving patient health outcomes PROJECT NARRATIVE Health service accreditation and certification programs are a critical mechanism to direct care quality improvements and ensure compliance with regulationsReporting on requisite measures is a resource intensive and costly process requiring human data abstractors to interpret heterogeneous and disparately presented data elements from the electronic health recordEHRReplacing human elements using evolving automated data abstraction methods and an interface for abstractors to better visualize EHR data and manage their workflow would solve an importantunmet need and offer a dramatic improvement over the status quoPatient Insight s commercial technology solution will facilitate efficiencies in automated data abstraction and human to computer interactions in quality improvement reporting