Electronic Health Records For Dummies

Identifying patient groups with registries

Step one in the group management journey is to identify patient groups and set up registries. After all, how will you know what services and care to offer if you don’t know whom it’s for? Registries in combination with clinical decision support can use symptoms, other diagnoses, and labs to identify patients who may have a disease before you or someone in your practice has diagnosed them. Setting up patient registries can also help you track outcomes and ongoing progress, look at your treatment methods, and make adjustments across an entire population (and meet some requirements of Meaningful Use, too).

Patient group registries aren’t the complete answer to all your clinical questions. You still have to enter and pull data correctly. Getting the right data entered is crucial because you don’t want to leave patients off the registry. Your information capture needs to consist of structured data and not just a text-based note. Most EHRs can’t mine free text information and pull out salient details, but the use of natural language processing is likely to come in future products. Natural language processing can convert free text into coded information.

While you’re designing and using your EHR to capture information:

Identify key information that you want to report on and monitor. This may include HgbA1C results for patient with diabetes, documentation ...