You likely have spent a lot of time and resources training your providers and your staff to ensure that your health care data gets into the EHR efficiently and accurately.  Proper documentation can help ensure high quality patient care, validate clinical research, and can support billing information that ties to your hospital’s reimbursement rates.  Each data field in the EHR is a valuable piece of information that tells a story of your patient and quality of your practice.  You may not know, however, that the EHR is not a black hole of patient information, and it is possible to get meaningful data back out of your EHR in an organized manner.

At Galen, we have a technical services team that can help you get the most of your data.  Our reporting analysts can assist you in getting the information you need, whether it’s a specific data set for a patient population, or a custom report in your EHR that you can modify with different input parameters (such as date range, provider, etc).

To give an example, I recently customized a Referrals Report for a client that wanted to see information about how their providers are referring patients and keep track of the internal vs. external referring practices.  This report is a printable document deployed in the Custom Reports section of the EHR that gives the client the ability to pull this data at any time to see referral data based on dates, providers, sites and referral type.  An interesting blog post on the importance of referral data was recently posted on Galen’s blog here.

Another type of report I recently built was a report for a client that wanted to see medication data for a specified population of home health care patients.  In this instance, the client wanted to see new and discontinued medications on a month to month basis including the medication name, dose, route, refill information and prescribing physician.  This client wanted a report that they can export to Microsoft Excel for their own data analysis.

These are just two examples of reports that our reporting analysts can customize for your organization. With over 1,000 tables in the Allscripts Enterprise EHR, there are numerous opportunities for data mining and analysis. We will also deploy the reports into your EHR during off-peak business hours to ensure a smooth transition and no disruptions to patient care.

Galen’s Solutions Store offers reports that have been developed for clients and built in the Allscripts Enterprise EHR that are available to purchase and can also be customized.  You can view samples of these reports here.

Having good quality data in your EHR is not only vital for patient safety, but it can also help you make business decisions that can impact staffing levels, inventory, budgeting and even assist in finding avenues for marketing new populations of patients.  If there is any information you think could be helpful to you and your organization, contact Galen to discuss how we can help you get the information you need.  You can also visit our public wiki for more information about reporting here. If you are wondering about how we can help you extract reportable structured note data, here is a link to a blog post referring to Galen’s solution to dealing with this type of data.

Stay tuned for upcoming posts about specific data reporting projects that have been built and customized by Galen’s Reporting Analysts.