In February 2013, Ambulatory Electronic Health Record (AEHR) implementations and go-lives were paused to improve the system and its efficiencies. The team worked on a variety of issues with the goal of improving performance. During the pause, PatientLink, an abstraction software/hardware system, was piloted at Family Physician Associates in Shelbyville, Ky.

Abstraction is the process of inputting patient data from a paper file into an electronic file. After a two-month PatientLink pilot and 2,200 abstracted records, the project team identified a potential for significant savings in abstraction costs. OneCare leadership reviewed the pilot results and decided to implement PatientLink in clinics system wide, beginning in the Louisville market.

PatientLink speeds up the abstraction process and creates more usable patient data than the manual abstraction process. This saves time and money. The pilot at Family Physician Associates showed that manual abstraction takes 20 minutes to complete for every five patients worth of data. Using the PatientLink system, the average abstraction time for every five patients dropped to seven minutes.

The 13 minutes of time saved with PatientLink is significant when projected across a large number of patients. For every 100 patients, this means it will take 2.33 hours to complete the abstraction process using PatientLink, compared to 6.67 hours using the normal abstraction method.

Improving go-live processes supports OneCare’s mission to transform health care and advance patient care by creating a universal, shared, electronic health record for each CHI patient.