What are the existing challenges in the medical data collection processes?

In-Brief:

• The collection of medical data determines the patient’s life quality improvement if the medical professionals, pharma, and the payers collaborate closely.
• Medical sectors must understand the collaborations between the patient, doctor, payer and prescription. The reliable data is now at the heart of any hospital decision.
• Any participant in the health care ecosystem to work with incomplete or fragmented data is unthinkable that prohibits them from giving valuable insights and opens doors for compliance risk. Pubrica discusses the challenges in the medical sectors for medical data collection service.

Introduction to Data Collection: A Messy Problem:

Electronic health records capture and manage the information collected during patient consultations. Personal health records and claims, patient portals, and reimbursement information from payers are present in different data sources of patients profiles from a medical device data collection. Additional variables that may contribute to health outcomes include health behaviours, physical environment, socioeconomic factors, and lifestyle. The information in healthcare is another consolidation and movement of data between various health care partners. The additional data about members and their environment may obtain from multiple vendors government sources that help make good predictions to the right patients at the right time. Data-driven recommendations and insights improve both quality and efficacy in hospitals, mainly for prevention of diseases and early identifying the risk populations.

Bringing all the data together and using it to make decisions is always a significant challenge. They are

• Fragmented data,
• Ever-changing data,
• Privacy and security regulations
• Patient expectations

1. Shattered Data:

Health care data come from perplexing sources with various formats like structured data, paper, videos, multimedia, digital pictures and so on. Data collection in medical sectors communities are equally shattered, making the integration and extraction of data is a real challenge. Employers, social network communities, Providers, payers, public health specialists and patients collect data, without unifying the information. There are bifurcation and replication of data with no single source. It results in imprecise and imperfect health care profiles with little insight into a patient’s health journey and a member’s having relationship with, payers, pharmacy, providers, friends and family members. A lack of miscommunication and understanding and support causes low cohesion and high risks. Poor communication often results in dismissal of procedures, rising the financial costs and inefficient utilisation of the resource in sample data collection form medical research.

2. Ever-changing Data:

The Patients and clinicians, may move, change their names and professions, retire and die like everyone else. The organisations also relocate, add new locations or go through different mergers and acquisitions. the introduction of new treatments and drugs, personalised care models change the service delivery and data captured, making it difficult to keep health care data complete, clean and current. Dry data and dormant information straightly impact the experience of member and business sustainability for the providers. It leads to delay in the adoption of new therapeutic options, insufficient response to medical sector programs and low commitment and experience and dependant to medical history data collection.

3. Privacy and Security Regulations:

Preserving trust from patients is the foundation for building a healthy medical sector ecosystem. Data security has become supremely crucial in the health care industry as the privacy of patients depends on HIPAA2 compliance and adopting secure electronic health records(EHR). Also, with flighty regulatory needs, protecting data sets and commitment compliant will become a challenge. Low data quality and strategy prevent organisations from meeting new regulatory needs and result in high costs associated with audits and reporting. Until data security and compliance issues addressing adequately, it’s a challenging task to increase healthcare with broader people for data collection in the medical field.

4. Expectations of the Patient:

The medical industry is about to experience the similar shift in retail, banking and hospitality management. The health care system is on-demand for the perfect service. At the same time, pressures from millennials and Generation will force medical sector organisations to prefer newer forms of commitment. Medical organisations must adapt themselves for a new generation, volume and type of persons. The industry will require to have an understanding of patients changing needs and their preferences and then provide solutions to align with their way of life.

5. Lack of quality assurance processes:

There may be only a few opportunities to confirm information with a patient who has been in contact with an emergency, meaning that the data initially collected cannot be determined. Additionally, the problems of record-keeping systems may differ, and data quality is often dependant on the person entering the data correctly. Relying on the resourcing of an organisation, may not permit time to staff for reviewing the information for completeness and get missing data in the data collection methods for medical research.

Conclusions:

Medical organisations are aspiring for a patient-centric focus that results in an excellent experience for members, cohesion to treatment, timely and continued patient commitment to provide valuable health information and regular reporting on the quality within the management and revenue of the health care. These often-competing objectives, up-to-date information and reliable data must be readily available of all concerned stakeholders in a practical manner. Data-driven benefits are making headway in this area, enabling health care organisations to transform massive volumes of data into enterprise assets, driving quality patient care and cost management for medical records collecting data. Pubrica briefly elaborates the existing challenges in the medical data collection.

References:

1. Gilchrist, J., Frize, M., Bariciak, E., & Townsend, D. (2008, August). Integration of new technology in a legacy system for collecting medical data-challenges and lessons learned. In 2008 30th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (pp. 4326-4329). IEEE.
2. Holden, R. J., Scott, A. M. M., Hoonakker, P. L., Hundt, A. S., & Carayon, P. (2015). Data collection challenges in community settings: Insights from two field studies of patients with chronic disease. Quality of Life Research, 24(5), 1043-1055.
3. Hassanien, A. E., Dey, N., & Borra, S. (Eds.). (, 2018). Medical Big Data and Internet of medical things: Advances, challenges and applications. CRC Press.