An AI-powered system developed on the Penn Medication Heart for Well being Care Transformation and Innovation (CHTI) in Philadelphia has tripled the velocity of fax processing and lower a full week off the brand new affected person consumption course of, in accordance with a paper revealed in NEJM Catalyst.
Though faxing could seem old style, individuals who work in healthcare understand it has been troublesome to get rid of as a result of interoperability challenges and institutional inertia. At College of Pennsylvania Well being System (UPHS), between 8,000 and 9,000 faxes are processed every day.
The brand new resolution, known as coordn8, automates the consumption and submitting of faxed paperwork into digital well being data and permits sufferers to digitally give their consent to launch data as a substitute of mailing kinds.
“Lowering processing time permits workers to give attention to extra patient-facing actions and ends in increased job satisfaction,” mentioned Jency Daniel, D.N.P., M.S.N., R.N., a lead transformation strategist at CHTI, in a press release. “On high of that, we designed this in a means in order that staff members can simply cowl for one another. Holidays or sick days received’t gradual the method down anymore.”
Throughout a nine-month pilot interval in 2023, the CHTI staff surveyed medical workers utilizing coordn8 and located that their satisfaction with the brand new affected person consumption course of jumped from 35 to 60 p.c in simply two weeks. As well as, a survey of coordn8 customers discovered the identical enchancment (35 to 60 p.c) of their “effort rating,” a measure of how workers felt in regards to the effort required to efficiently file incoming faxes into the digital medical report.
Fax processing time below coordn8 improved from a median of two minutes to simply about 40 seconds. So, for each 100,000 faxes processed (a quantity reached each 11 to 12 days at Penn Medication now), workers may save 2,300 hours of time that might be dedicated to different important duties.
The paper additionally particulars the coordn8 course of for getting sufferers’ consent to share previous well being data, resembling take a look at outcomes and scans.
At the beginning of each new affected person consumption course of, many healthcare organizations require a signed launch of data kind, and this usually means a snail-mailed piece of paper. On common, it took per week to course of this at UPHS. Digitizing the consent (now known as eDisclosure) lowered each the steps required from a affected person and the time it took to get the precise kind from UPHS to the affected person and again once more.
By sending the eDisclosure by way of textual content message, the coordn8 staff decreased the time it took to get a affected person signature by 85 p.c. (Sufferers can nonetheless get a paper kind, in the event that they select.)
The NEJM Catalyst paper described the preliminary implementation in additional than 150 fax strains throughout many alternative departments throughout UPHS. Now coordn8 is increasing its fax processing and eDisclosure kind to span outpatient providers all through Penn Medication.
The researchers declare that in simply over a yr and a half of use, coordn8 has reached a median of greater than 3,000 faxes per day and saved a complete of 8,500 workers hours in whole.
The Penn Medication staff has suggestions for different well being programs trying to deploy an answer like coordin8. “For different well being programs trying to apply this, it’s important to establish the departments with the best want and the best willingness to take part,” mentioned Yevgeniy Gitelman, M.D., head of Customized Software program at CHTI and affiliate chief medical data officer at Penn Medication, in a press release. “If others in a well being system can see their colleagues thriving, it would enhance buy-in and assist to higher broaden a service like this, growing its influence.”
The College of Pennsylvania Well being System amenities embrace the Hospital of the College of Pennsylvania, Penn Presbyterian Medical Heart, Chester County Hospital, Doylestown Well being, Lancaster Normal Well being, Princeton Well being, and Pennsylvania Hospital.
