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Month: February 2021

Candace Aguirre, Lead Scan Operator Shares Experiences

This month, we speak to Candace Aguirre, Lead Scan Operator about our mailroom operations, Covid-19 business impacts, and working on an inclusive team. 

 What does a day in the Lubbock Mailroom look like?  

Most days are busy. On average, we scan approximately 13,000 claims, and we send out about ten deliveries for returning checks and outgoing mail. My team is very hardworking and dedicated. I appreciate their reliability and admire their dedication. One of our stars is Kiemodrick Matthews. He is always punctual, conducts his day with efficiency, and arrives with a ready-to-work attitude. In the ongoing pandemic, they have continued to be dedicated to their work-family by exemplifying one of our company’s core values, trust in team.   

Has your department experienced any recent challenges?   

One challenge that has impacted many teams globally is the Covid-19 pandemic. We do our best to keep a clean and safe work environment. Our company provides supplies including disinfecting spray and wipes, hand sanitizer, gloves, face masks, and face shields. We also maintain social distancing in the workplace.   

Even with these precautions, our group has felt the effects of the virus. We have experienced some positive testing. Our impacted members were able to take recovery times as needed and return to good health.  

While this put us behind in some areas, we are maintaining productivity by being extremely dedicated and our operations have been continuous. We utilized healthy team members and some temporary workers to maintain steady production and catch up where we needed the extra support.    

What would you like to share about working at HealthAxis?  

The thing I value most about the culture at HealthAxis is that we are very inclusive. We operate with high values and consider objectives from all perspectives. These efforts allow our team to feel heard and considered in leadership decisions. An example of this is our floating holidays. The employee selected days off permit our team members to celebrate their community backgrounds and cultures.   

Even though some offices are states apart, we have managers virtually supporting one another and working together to keep strong company communication. As needed, we have managers traveling throughout the organization to help each other with a hands-on approach. This dynamic has been extremely helpful in critical situations. 

Evolution of Healthcare Analytics 

Healthcare analytics is the process of aggregating and evaluating current and historical industry data to predict trends, improve outreach, and better manage business practices and the spread of diseases. Analytics in healthcare is making a significant difference in today’s treatments and facility management.  

Benefits of Healthcare Analytics 

The healthcare industry has generated large amounts of data, driven by record keeping, compliance and regulatory requirements, and patient care. Historically, data was stored in hard copy form, but many healthcare organizations are becoming more efficient and effective through incorporating software and technology.  

Healthcare analytics derives insights at both the macro and micro levels for systemic wastes of resources. Analytics track individual practitioner performance, record the health of populations and identify the risk of chronic diseases. With all this information, health systems can efficiently allocate resources to maximize population health, revenue, and patient care.  

History of Healthcare Analytics 

Traditionally, health records were written on paper, maintained in folders divided into sections based on the type of note, and only one copy was available. Technological innovations, such as the computer, led to new health information approaches starting in the 1960s and laid the foundation for developing the Electronic Health Record (EHR).  

The first EHR appeared in the 1960s, and by 1965, approximately 73 hospitals and clinical information projects and 28 efforts for the storage and retrieval of medical documents and other clinical information were underway, according to HIMSS. The adoption and effective use of EHRs not only enabled better documentation and file organization but shifted the format of health records, and thus changed health care. 

In 1970, as computers became more accessible in academic research centers, there was a growing interest in developing Medical Diagnosis Decision Support Systems (MDDS). These systems are all-in-one computer programs that pinpoint medical diagnoses when patient information enters the system. Such developments, particularly in diagnosis decision support, have high complexity. While these efforts were novel at the time, they did not employ a formal knowledge model. Instead, they relied on the characteristics of the data. Therefore, it was difficult to generate a clear explanation for a decision made by the system. 

By 1990, innovators within the industry pushed for more education around the introduction of healthcare analytics. During this time, there was a recognition by researchers and developers that Artificial Intelligence systems in healthcare had to be designed to build on the expertise of physicians and accommodate the absence of perfect data. Approaches involving Bayesian networks and artificial neural networks were applied to intelligent computing systems in healthcare.  

Healthcare Analytics Today 

Before the 2000s, almost all medical data was on paper, and physicians spent hours manually entering information. Today, healthcare analytics is changing how medical professionals can work with patient data to execute a better experience. Our modern neural networks can outperform humans in tasks that are more complex than EKG interpretation. Doctors and nurses now use handheld devices to record patients’ real-time data and instantly update their medical history. With these digital advancements, better and more accessible treatments are available for a wide variety of diseases, making healthcare more efficient, providing advanced care, and supporting a higher rate of disease control. 

HealthAxis’ Role in Healthcare Analytics 

Our HxLogic solution is a comprehensive, integrable system enabling full lifecycle analysis. It effectively consolidates and analyzes data into usable and easily consumable information that pinpoints areas for action. Our system provides hundreds of dynamic metrics with alerts and reports to healthcare professionals through our pre-built healthcare data model, data marts, intelligence dashboards, reports, and analytics.  

Using HxLogic you can manage healthcare costs, adapt and become more compliant with new healthcare regulations, improve quality of care, detect fraud, and streamline processes.  

Our dedicated healthcare team at HealthAxis provides consulting and implementation services from strategy and planning through end-user training and personalized support. Let us help you identify and meet your analytic goals. Get started today with HealthAxis.