We’ve effectively digitized medical record via EHRs, but the healthcare industry still relies heavily on paper for many of its workflows and supporting documents. On this episode, we talk with Bill DeStefanis, Director of Product Strategy at Nuance about how and why paper is still widely used in healthcare, how we can keep it secure, and how we can effectively integrate it into our digital workflows.
3:30 Digital record keeping is solving different problems than what doctors are suffering from. If we give them something better to solve their problem, they’ll start using it.
4:30 Who is Nuance? Speech recognition and document transfer. The break-through is in the details.
7:36 Admissions files, discharge summaries, prescriptions, labs, referrals, transferring patients out of network. We’ve been focusing on the medical records but all the supporting documents are still paper.
9:16 Integrating document transfer at the point of care.
14:00 Could we come up with a document classification system? Introducing the Document Type Code Format! Great chance to build consensus at HIMSS!
16:15 Paper users are first class citizens and we need to find a way to provide value to them throughout their transition to digital. Attachments matter and user experience matter
20:28 Physical paper, fax, pdf, email, website content, multimodal are all unstructured data. How can you get relevant information to the right people at the point of care?
23:05 Unique opportunities for mobile data capture.
26:23 “You can’t control what happens outside of your organization. You know they are all going to continue to use paper, but how do you stop the progression of that paper once it gets to your door? How do you take it in and convert it to your digital workflow so that you can get measurable benefits?”
30:45 What are the costs and benefits of paper? Printing has obvious ink and paper costs but in addition, 20% of all help desk calls are about printing.
34:20 How do you get to the top of your hospital’s priority list? Security.
36:42 Printers have enough CPU power that an agent could take over and redirect data. Print management gives you an audit trail. Easy reports for security specialists.
39:46 Security professionals are often not aware of facility paper volumes.
42:31 Who should be in charge of print management? Is it security, clinical, or productivity? Differences in small, midsize, and large organizations?
48:01 Stop asking doctors to do more data entry. It’s time for codifying data and making it useful for analytics and pop health. Make this a back end data problem.
49:20 What are you doing at HIMSS?
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About Bill DeStefanis
As Nuance’s Director of Product Strategy, Bill brings more than 20 years of experience in the software industry to the position. He is responsible for defining Nuance Imaging product strategy and vision. During his time at Nuance Bill has lead product management teams designing solutions that automate document workflows. Before joining Nuance, Bill was held various product management positions in companies developing voice recognition and natural language processing applications. He holds an MBA from Suffolk University.
About Nuance
We are reinventing the relationship between people and technology. At Nuance, we believe in the power of intelligent systems, and quite specifically what that power can do for you. Our innovations in voice, natural language understanding, reasoning and systems integration come together to create more human technology.
Used by 90% of hospitals and 10,000 healthcare organizations worldwide, our AI‑powered solutions capture 300 million patient stories each year. We help unburden clinicians, radiologists and care teams with efficient new ways to capture clinical information, applying real-time intelligence for better decision making across the continuum of care.
NOTE: Nuance Document Imaging is now a part of Kofax
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