3 Key Roadblocks to Digital Healthcare Data Capture
A strategic discussion around the barriers to digital data capture in global healthcare
The global healthcare industry has seen more than its fair share of concerns and upsets over the last few years, and from those unprecedented moments, we’ve learned a lot about the future of healthcare data. While we may not have all the answers or the best solutions implemented, we do know a lot more about what challenges we may face in the future, and some of the ways we can work together as a global community to address them.
Within the healthcare industry as a whole, everything from caring for an aging population to improving access to life-saving care in rural or undeveloped areas, there’s one thing we do know: Better data can only help us be better prepared. Improved data tracking can lead to faster identification of growing global risks, more accurate preventative care, earlier discovery of warning signs for preventable diseases, and collaborative solutions to more pressing health and wellness crises. Here are some of the leading data challenges healthcare teams around the world are facing and some recommendations on how they can begin to work around them.
A Lack of Standardized Data
A growing issue faced by all sizes of healthcare organizations is a lack of standardization among captured data. From the moment of patient intake through treatment plans, a plethora of data is captured from the patient into the organization’s specific systems. While there are multiple platforms available, there is no set industry standard, and with home-brewed solutions being more accessible for smaller practices, it’s never a guarantee what data is being pulled or how it’s being stored.
With a universally standardized patient intake form, the data being captured by each organization could align with other patient data captured from other organizations. While each healthcare system and practice may have different needs for data to collect from each patient, a standardized form can help streamline that data capture in a way that makes it easier to align with each patient profile. Additionally, by setting a standard format for the data to be collected, it paves the way for more robust information to be added later, or by other organizations if the patients have consented to sharing their healthcare data.
“The lack of standards has also prevented the reuse of clinical data to meet the broad range of patient safety and quality reporting requirements.”
Without standardizing patient data, clinicians and healthcare staff face growing issues of being able to accurately compare trends or diagnostic anomalies, limiting the abilities of healthcare professionals to identify potential issues earlier. Getting all healthcare organizations on board for standardized data capture in the future may take time, but the potential of expansive aggregate data would be worth the time investment.
Privacy Concerns and HIPAA Compliance
Healthcare data faces an additional obstacle that not all industries do, privacy concerns from patients, clinical trials, and research organizations. In an increasingly digital world, where online access to personal information grows exponentially, the ability to protect and keep confidential patient data remains a top priority.
These privacy issues aren’t exclusive from the standardization issues either, with different sub-industries, countries, and even individual organizations having different standards for confidentiality. However, if the healthcare community as a whole can work together to create uniform requirements for patient privacy, the ability to protect patients can only grow.
By switching to digital data capture, many privacy concerns over access to paper documents can be easily eliminated with HIPAA-compliant forms, at least for those adhering to United States compliance. Alternatively, if international standards are created, digital forms could easily be configured to meet those new privacy standards and streamline healthcare data capture across all specialties and locations. By utilizing digital HIPAA forms, depending on the platform being used, it would also be easier for these healthcare organizations to anonymize aggregate patient data for faster sharing capabilities. Digital data capture would also eliminate the need for manual re-entry, not only minimizing errors or miscalculations, but also providing faster means of getting the information into databases where they can be used for larger analysis.
“The primary justification for protecting personal privacy is to protect the interests of individuals. In contrast, the primary justification for collecting personally identifiable health information for health research is to benefit society. But it is important to stress that privacy also has value at the societal level, because it permits complex activities, including research and public health activities to be carried out in ways that protect individuals’ dignity.”
Insufficient Collaboration Opportunities
Within any individual healthcare system, it’s common for physicians and staff members to collaborate or consult with one another for unique patient situations, so it should come as no surprise that being able to collaborate openly with healthcare professionals around the world would only improve patient care. Specifically, in more rural or suburban areas, digital consultations can provide access to care previously unavailable, which is already something that telehealth opportunities are providing.
Current methods of data capture and maintenance are often siloed, and restricted to individual healthcare systems, without any easy means of collaboration between organizations, let alone countries or continents. With more streamlined data capture, and more unified access to anonymized data, providers around the world would be able to consult additional information previously unavailable in their area. While maintaining data privacy and confidentiality would still pose a concern, the possible benefits greatly outweigh the time cost associated with building such a database.
Data capture in the global healthcare industry has a long way to go before it can start providing new insights and benefits to the wider community, and many uphill challenges to face along the way. While the road may be long, the limitless possibilities between preventing another global crisis and finding new treatment options for long-term illnesses are worth the effort.
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