Oct 09, 2015When a patient visits a medical facility, a doctor will likely use a laptop or tablet to access his or her medical records, and to input notes from the current visit. This clerical process, in which the provider inputs data while sitting with the patient, acts as a barrier when it comes to developing a trusting relationship, argues Peter Ragusa, the founder and CEO of Better Day Health, a health-care technology startup based in New Orleans.
The company has developed a solution in partnership with RFID technology provider Barcoding Inc. that employs passive ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID and voice-recognition technologies to make the management of electronic health records (EHR) more automatic, and to prevent physicians from having to divide their time during patient visits between the patients themselves and their device's keyboard.
The RFID-based technology is being piloted at ENT Associates and the Imperial Health Center for Orthopaedics, both located in Lake Charles, La.
Better Day Health was founded by Ragusa, who is an M.D., and a group of other health-care professionals, with the goal of improving the collection and management of EHRs, as well as the efficiency of the health-care services being provided to patients. The aim, he says, is to use technology to provide people-centric solutions that make a doctor's visit more pleasant and personal, while relieving the physician of the task of data entry.
The company developed a solution that features software to manage data regarding the locations of patients and doctors, and to link that information to relevant health records. The system also includes RFID tags and readers to monitor the locations of patients in waiting areas and examining rooms, and to automatically pull up patient records for physicians when they enter an exam room. Better Day Health voice-recognition software enables the automatic capture and transcription of conversations between a patient and the physician, providing the doctor with a record of what was said without him or her having to take notes.
According to Ragusa, the health-care market has lagged behind in technology innovation in the IT sector. "There's been nothing when it comes to innovation focused on the user [patient and doctor] experience." Therefore, he says, his team "decided to create a system for clinical documentation."
The solution is a documentation system with real-time awareness, says Kenneth Currie, Barcoding Inc.'s business-development VP. With RFID and voice recognition, the technology is designed to be an add-on to a health-care provider's existing EHR system, in order to make access to information automatic.
First, upon arriving at a doctor's office, a patient is handed a badge containing a Zebra Technologies UHF Gen 2 RFID plastic card made with an Impinj Monza 4QT RFID chip. The unique ID number of the card's RFID chip is linked to the patient's ID in the Better Day Health software. (At the end of the visit, the patient simply returns the card for reuse by another patient.)
The system can then display an update on a monitor when an exam room is ready for that patient, or a staff member can access that data and personally invite the patient to the specific room. RFID readers installed around the facility will monitor that individual's movements, via his or her RFID card, and the software will determine when the patient has arrived in the exam room. This information, stored in the software, can then be viewed by health-care providers.
Each physician and nurse also wears a similar RFID card containing that individual's own identity information, which is linked in the software to the card's encoded ID number. In addition, personnel carry a tablet running an app that enables access to patient-related data via the Better Day Health software. The solution also comes with an audio-capture device that automatically captures and transcribes the conversation between a doctor and a patient, parses and processes that text, and links the key information to the patient's chart.
As the physician enters the room, a reader installed at the entranceway reads her RFID tag and enables the Better Day Health software to determine that the doctor is with a particular patient. The software then directs the tablet to display that patient's health-care record. Therefore, the physician need not look for the patient's records upon or before entering, thereby shortening the process of greeting that patient and discussing the individual's issues. The Better Day Health app residing on the tablet converts the conversation to text, and the software enables the physician to review that data and extract elements from the conversation, allowing the system to automatically look up some diagnosis options. She can then scroll through those diagnoses and select those that most likely apply to the patient's symptoms.
"This allows the health-care provider to avoid the log-in and typing process," Ragusa explains. "You're never talking to the system while sitting with the patient."
The RFID-based data allows a clinic or doctor's office not only to automate data access and acquisition for physicians in the examination room, but also to create workflow-based data to help office managers improve efficiency by scheduling visits according to historical records about how long patients wait, and on what particular days or times, as well as to better manage how rooms are utilized. The information can also make it easier for employees to determine, in real time, that an exam room is ready to be prepared for the next patient, as well as how long that patient has been waiting in an exam room.
The system has been installed in several doctors' offices, Ragusa says, where it is still being piloted. Both deployments, Currie adds, are using a combination of Motorola (Zebra) FX7400 and Impinj Speedway Revolution R420 readers, installed in such a way as to be unobtrusive and largely invisible to patients. One is installed under the front desk counter, while others are deployed at each exam room's entrance (mounted at a doorway, in the ceiling or behind a nameplate).
"RFID has been used in health care a long time," Currie states, "but typically, it's been used for track and trace [of assets]." The Better Day Health solution takes that technology to another level by automating the access of patient data when physicians enter an exam room. However, Better Day Health can also offer asset-tracking functionality by including Barcoding Inc.'s asset-tracking software, RFID RealView, which can help an office identify not only where pumps and other equipment are located, but also when a piece of equipment is in a room with a specific patient, thereby creating a record of that event.
Ragusa reports that Better Day Health is currently in discussions with multiple potential end users, including academic health-care facilities. "We're very excited to see the interest this has generated," he says. With his company's solution, he predicts, both the provider and the patient will have a better experience.
