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Premiere Episode: Velocity Interoperability Podcast
The Velocity Interoperability Blog and Velocity Interoperability Podcast are sponsored by Velocity Health Informatics. Velocity provides both data quality and data integration as a service offerings to ensure that healthcare providers access the correct patient record with the right data for each patient they serve. See the introductory blog post.
TODAYS GUEST Stacie Durkin, Co-Founder and CEO of Velocity Health Informatics
Stacy joined us for the Premiere Episode: Velocity Interoperability Podcast to introduce Velocity, the podcast, and the issues related to data quality, interoperability and medical record errors/remediation. Specifically, we discuss the following with Stacie:
- What are some of the data quality problems healthcare providers are having?
- What causes these problems?
- A recent guest told me that providers’ EHRs typically contain 8-12% duplicates, is that what you are finding?
- I understand that Velocity has two main offerings to help providers with these problems, one helps with the data quality of medical records and the other with the quality of their integrated (clinical, claims, socio-demographic?) data. Will you describe the medical record remediation offering first?
- Do I understand you correctly that you are providing the services to help them reduce their errant records because often they don’t have enough staff to do it themselves?
- And will you know describe your data integration offering?
- You’re one of the few firms that is providing both of these services. Why do you see this as important?
- Data quality is an ongoing effort and I know that’s why you’ve established a platform approach to monitor this in an ongoing service. What are some examples of some results are your customers seeing from your services?
- I understand that you are involved in the CHIME $1M Patient ID Challenge? Will you tell us about your involvement and any observations that you have of the process?
- What’s next Velocity? What are you working on that you plan to bring to your customers at we close 2016 and head into 2017?
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About Velocity
Velocity Health Informatics Inc., previously Health eGRC, was founded in 2011. We are a woman-owned company headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri. Our solutions and services are designed to meet the needs of Accountable Care Organizations, Hospital Systems, Health Information Organizations and Insurers. Velocity is one of the few firms that provides medical record remediation and data integration/data quality AS-A-Service offerings for healthcare providers that are overwhelmed with the amount of medical record duplicates and errors and the issues those errors create up and down stream in their data integration.
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The Velocity Interoperability Blog and Velocity Interoperability Podcast are sponsored by Velocity Health Informatics. Velocity provides both data quality and data integration as a service offerings to ensure that healthcare providers access the correct patient record with the right data for each patient they serve.
Transcript
Joe Lavelle: 0.00 Welcome to the Velocity Interoperability Podcast brought to you by the gurus at Velocity, I am your host, Joe Lavelle and I am really looking forward to another thought provoking discussion where we further investigate data quality, interoperability and medical record remediation.
We’re going to get right to it today. We are joined by Stacie Durkin, CEO at Velocity Health Informatics. Stacie welcome to the Velocity Interoperability Podcast!
Stacie Durkin: 0.25 Well thank you Joe, thank you for having me.
Joe Lavelle: 0.28 Thanks so much for making the time and for sponsoring the Velocity Interoperability Podcast and really putting this whole concept together, before we start our discussion could you take a few seconds to tell the audience about you and your background?
Stacie Durkin: 0.40 Yes I’ve been in Healthcare for over 35 years and originally I was a critical care nurse. Then I became a medical records administrator, I came into technology when I left the bedside of a patients and I was able to find another way to advocate for the patients along my career.
Joe Lavelle: 0.57 I love it! Another way to advocate for patients, that’s what it’s all about. Could you then take a minute or so Stacie and give us the 10,000 foot overview of what you and your team do at Velocity?
Stacie Durkin: 1.10 Sure we started our company back in 2011 under Health eGRC and we was focused on Government risk compliance. We saw an opportunity in working in the high tech program to do some work force development with some of the other industries that where coming into healthcare due to the shortage of integration and implementation jobs. In January of this year we changed our name to Velocity Health Informatics, we are primarily a women owned company, we focus on Data Quality integration and remediation, master data management and information governance.
Joe Lavelle: 1.48 Great Stacie! Let’s start here; what are some of the data quality problems that healthcare providers are having out there?
Stacie Durkin: 1.55 Receiving data that is accurate and complete, many times information provided by the patient or collected from acquisitions and mergers are not always complete and the provider doesn’t know whether he can trust the data or not.
Joe Lavelle: 2.12 What causes these kinds of problems?
Stacie Durkin: 2.14 Either in collection of the data from the source, the conversion from paper to electronic media. We have lost some of that data already its not been well consumed into the electronic medical record. Other issues are around being able to match records and link them or to be able to get a 360 view of the patient because of duplicates. And that’s why we do remediation.
Joe Lavelle: 2.41 I had a guest just on Friday and she talked about the duplicate medical record issue and she said that a good rule of thumb was 8 to 12% of medical records are duplicates. I probably botched how I described that, but is that what your finding too, that somewhere around 10% of all medical records have some kind of problems with being duplicate?
Stacie Durkin: 3.06 Yes that’s true, that’s pretty much the industry standard, but it deeply depends on the organizations’ commitment to data quality and seeing their data as an asset. So if they have put into place proactive types of procedures that help them to keep a clean data base and accurately identify the patients at the point of care then it can be even lower than that and if not, higher so.
Joe Lavelle: 3.44 So you’re doing important work! Stacie, I understand that Velocity has two main offerings to help healthcare providers with these problems, one helps with the data quality of the medical record and the other with the quality of the integrated data, will you first describe the medical record remediation offering that you have first?
Stacie Durkin: 3.51 Sure, we like to have an analysis of the client’s database to see exactly how many duplicates or potential linkages that we may have. We then usually do a remote remediation, we take privacy and security very seriously, we usually VPN into the clients application and behind the firewall we do our remediation within their application following the same kind of business rules that they do every single day and making sure that when we turn it over to them so it’s exactly what they had when they started and it’s easy for them to pick up and keep it clean.
Joe Lavelle: 4.32 So if I hear you right, what your doing is your helping those organizations take that 10% down to some smaller number because I am just guessing one of the reasons it’s that high is they don’t have the staff to fix these problems themselves. Is that how it works?
Stacie Durkin: 4.48 Many times, or they don’t have the procedures in place to actually monitor and to remediate the data themselves, and then the problem grows so large that the staffing and the human resource necessary currently to do that type of a cleanup is overwhelming. We are able to come in and help them with the cleanup and augment their staff.
Joe Lavelle: 5.09 And I understand the key part of your offering is then fixing the problems that create those errors and duplicates in the first place. Is that correct?
Stacie Durkin: 5.18 We make recommendations to the organization on things that we see that would actually help improve the remediation and the mitigation of the potential duplicates, things such as establishing data collection standards that are consistent with the attributes that they are branching on. We also help them with their thresholds and we can do testing and work with their staff to help mitigate all of the potential opportunities for duplicates.
Joe Lavelle: 5.49 Stacie we have talked about your medical record remediation offering. Will you now describe your data integration offering?
Stacie Durkin: 6.06 For our data integration offering we actually took our staff that we hired because we had a little history, we had an engagement that there was no resources available to build the interfaces so we hired some of our students, we trained them and certified them in HL7 then we also trained and certified them on the integration engine that the organization was using. We build the interfaces, we test the interfaces and we can maintain them if that’s the opportunity that the client wants us to provide. We have also developed a data quality and integrity appliance that actually interrogates the data that comes through to insure that it is actually meeting the standards and we do that through HL7 and X12. We then are able to provide reports that to clients about where the errors are specifically, to the field level, so that can they corrected at the source.
Joe Lavelle: 7.06 Perfect, you are one of the few firms that provides both the medical records remediation and an integration platform or as a service offering so to say, why do you see this as important?
Stacie Durkin: 7.16 Whenever you can eliminate the gaps between the delivery of the data and the quality of the data, your improving and it becomes much more efficient for the organizations. Providers receive the data that is accurate and timely then.
Joe Lavelle: 7.34 Stacie we all know data quality is an ongoing effort and I know that’s why you have established a platform approach to monitor this has an ongoing service, what are some of the examples of the results that your customers are seeing from the service you’re providing to them?
Stacie Durkin: 7.48 They are able to reduce the cost of the human resource to research and correct errors, the data analyst doesn’t have to pour through error reports to find where the problems are. We actually can provide them exactly where the problems are and we can trim those so that they can see whether or not there are training issues or configuration issues or whether or not there potentially a vendor issue.
Joe Lavelle: 8.13 Outstanding, Stacie one of the things we have been covering on our show from time to time is the CHIIME $1 Million Patient ID challenge, I know you guys are somewhat involved in that. Will you tell us about your involvement and any observations you have about the process so far?
Stacie Durkin: 8.28 Our involvement, I actually participated when we were on a project out in California for one of the (health information) exchanges with GPII who has the use of the voluntary unique identifier, and we actually operationalized putting that into several ambulatory settings under a Robert woods Johnson Grant. Due to the participation in that project DPII has received a letter for the potential contender for the demonstration and has reached out to us to see whether or not we would be interested in helping to operationalize and do the training at the sites. We have to do an assessment so that it works within their workflow and is not disruptive at all. So time will tell once they make the awards, whether or not we will be actively involved.
Joe Lavelle: 9.22 Got it, what’s next for Velocity Stacie ,what are you working on that you will bring your customers as we close up 2016 and heading to 2017?
Stacie Durkin: 9.32 Of course it’s the platform development and furthering that. We are putting it on the Informatica platform, so we are looking at a lot more data quality, providing quality data to analytic groups for better analytics. We are also looking at expanding our work force in remediation and integration departments.
Joe Lavelle: 9.54 Perfect, thank so much you have got a lot on your plate we plan on keeping a close tab on your progress and all the great things your learning out there. Stacie it was such a great pleasure to have you thanks for stopping by and sharing your wisdom with our audience today.
Stacie Durkin: 10.08 Thank you Joe it’s been a pleasure.
Joe Lavelle: 10.11 its been our pleasure as well, before we wrap up our conversation we would like to thank the great folks at Velocity for sponsoring the show. Let’s go right now to WWW.velocityhealthinformatics.com. Bookmark the site to find out more about the innovative ways of solving data quality and interoperability needs of their clients. And now on behalf of our Guest Stacie Durkin I am Joe Lavelle and we will be back soon with another informative episode of the Velocity interoperability podcast. See you then.
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