It has been over 1 week since the potentially seismic shift in information blocking took place on October 6 2022. Under continued evolution of the 21st Century Cure’s Act, the definition of Electronic Health Information (EHI) has extended from just variables defined within United States Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI) to all electronic patient information. Patients can now request their entire medical record be accessible, which opens the doors to far better information sharing between patient, provider and payer.
What’s the big difference? Well – as of October 6 – it’s any data, and that means the biggest change is that all electronic notes can now be shared.
What does that mean for healthcare organizations?
Let’s take, for example, a Medicare Advantage Organization, looking to improve Risk Adjustment. These payers can now seek permission from their members to request complete EHI from those patients’ multiple providers. This enables payers to better review the complete medical records of these patients, to ensure that accurate and complete coding for Risk Adjustment is taking place. This huge new volume of information leads to potential difficulties for the payers e.g., how to read and process such a large volume of complex unstructured data? With the data coming in different formats – such as CCDA, HL7 and FHIR – it’s not easy to capture and organize this data for coders or chart reviewers to do their job effectively.
As was outlined at the start of the year by Micki Tripathi, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at ONC, this is exactly where technology like Natural Language Processing (NLP) comes in. With its ability to process disparate data, normalize complex information to relevant coding standards – such as ICD10CM, and present relevant information within context to these reviewers, NLP technology can equip payers for this latest development in the healthcare data revolution.
Learn more at our upcoming webinar.
