Ask any physician how they collect data within their healthcare facility for scientific research or quality improvement, chances are the answer will be:
"We deploy students or physician assistants to dig out files, fill Excel sheets and invite patients for questionnaires. After months of work, we finally have data, which we then have to clean up before we can do research on it. If we are lucky, the same students or physician (assistants) are still on board, but sometimes they have already gone elsewhere. The data collected then sometimes disappears unused into an archive never to come out again."
This is the reality in many healthcare facilities. Manual data collection is time-consuming, error-prone and limited. For a long time, there simply was no better alternative.
New approach: Collecting data as a byproduct of healthcare
With ConsultAssistent, we show how things can be done differently. Our digital auto-anamnesis directly improves the care process, helps prepare patients better and ensures more effective and efficient consultations and much less administrative burden. With follow-ups, we give physician and patient better insight into the course of symptoms and treatment. Physicians immediately receive a structured overview of complaints, medical history, medication use and risk factors and prognostic variables.
And the best part? This process automatically produces a continuous stream of structured data for a learning healthcare system!
Case study: relationship medication and symptoms
Niels Sprangers - product manager of ConsultAssistent says: "Recently, a doctor wanted to know if there might be a connection between the use of a certain medication and the occurrence of specific symptoms. This physician wanted a dataset to be able to do research on this.
Continuous collection of structured data allowed us to quickly compile a comprehensive dataset with high data quality, including relevant confounders such as age, medical history and lifestyle. This dataset consisted not only of data from our own hospital, but also from other hospitals using ConsultAssistent. In no time, this physician had a dataset of more than 10,000 patients!
In the past, several physician assistants at multiple hospitals would have spent months on this."
New opportunities with these structured datasets
In addition to answering research questions quickly, with high quality and consistency, this data offers very more opportunities.
- Accelerate innovation:Data-driven decision-making becomes easier. You can react faster to new insights and treatments.
- Triage: Based on the symptoms and medical history, it can be automatically estimated whether a patient needs to be seen at the outpatient clinic, or needs additional examination first, or perhaps does not even need a (physical) appointment at all. This makes the use of care more targeted, waiting times shorter and patients receive the right care in the right place faster.
- Machine Learning and AI: The quality and size of these datasets makes them ideal for the application of Machine Learning and AI. Examples include developing predictive models for differential diagnosis, risk estimation of complications in surgery, personalized treatment suggestions based on patient profiles, predicting needed clinical trials or better recognition of rare diseases and risks.
- Improved quality and patient safety: With instant access to current insights, protocols can be optimized more quickly and care can respond more quickly to new scientific insights. This results in better care outcomes and increased patient satisfaction.
AVG and data security: a prerequisite
Security and privacy are paramount. Patients give explicit consent for the use of their data. Data is anonymized or pseudonymized and stored on certified, secure servers within the Netherlands, in compliance with AVG, DPIAs, NEN-7510 and ISO 27001.
Seizing opportunities and learning together
The future of healthcare data is continuous, structured and intelligent. Choose a smart solution where data collection is the byproduct of delivering care. That way you kill multiple birds with one stone: better patient care, more efficient processes, as well as ongoing opportunities for research and innovation. CIOs, CDOs and CMIOs, and quality managers benefit from this approach, as do physicians who want quick, reliable answers to clinical questions.
Together, let's improve care by using data more and smartly. Better insights today means more effective care tomorrow. How are you currently collecting data within your institution? Do you see opportunities for this approach? Let us know in the comments!
Read the original post on our LinkedIn page.