Could RPA Help Tidy up Patient Records?
Many electronic records are a mess. If you look at a summary of problems - it should be a neat tidy list of active and past problems split into major and minor. Perhaps with episodes linked so that Abdominal pain that became gallstones that ended in a Lap Cholecystectomy should be grouped together. That MI (heart attack) should be obvious so should that Duodenal ulcer even if it was 10 years ago. In practice they are a mess with all sorts of things showing that shouldn’t, significance all over the place and despite a few OCD GPs attempts with the plethora of people involved in care its very easy to get into a mess. Now you could argue that the system shouldn’t let you do this.. that’s another post… the question for today is how do we tidy them up?
Remember the GP record - forms the basis of the shared record that all other users use. The record goes off to insurance companies and Pensions agencies and Benefits - often in a right mess.
For most it only takes 5 mins to tidy them up but with 10000 pts and a 5% turnover a year most people haven’t the time.. But its a simple rule based system - had an MI? That’s a past significant problem. Got 27 diagnoses of asthma - combine them into one and give the starting date etc.. isn’t this rich for RPA to sort?
The problem who pays? The GP?? well good luck with that one - we are struggling with electricity bills and yes while it may make my life easier a lot of the benefits are to others? So would the insurance companies pay? That’s the way iGPR works… should the regulators build it into the requirements for an EPR? probably… Should shared records teams care about the quality of the data going into their Lakes - I think so… an RPA company isn’t going to build this without someone paying for it.
However given patients are about to be given full access to their records - could we ask them to do it?? on their own records? or even more radical could we crowd source it? are there mad individuals that would sit and tidy up others records for something to do? or some sort of reward? could it be built into some form of I’m not a robot widget.. though of course a robot would be good at it…
High quality easy to read notes summaries benefit everyone - why aren’t we pursuing them?