DATAMARK, Inc., a leading provider of global business services to Fortune 500 companies and government organizations, has released a white paper, “Unstructured Data in Electronic Health Record (EHR) Systems: Challenges and Solutions,” that highlights the challenges healthcare providers face in bringing unstructured information into electronic health record (EHR) systems.

Most healthcare providers have made great progress in implementing EHR systems that meet the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) requirements for certified EHR systems. However, these certified EHR systems use and capture data that is in a structured format--information stored in a database that can be accessed with pull-down menus, for example.

The challenge, then, for organizations that want to create a truly all-electronic health record, is how to bring in all unstructured data into a patient’s “digital file.” Common examples of unstructured data in a healthcare setting include: 

• Claims and EOB forms
• Invoices and purchase orders
• Scanned medical reports
• Handwritten notes
• Diagnostic images
• Voice dictation

“Quite often, healthcare managers believe that if they have met the requirements for adopting an EHR system certified by CMS, that their organization has achieved the goal of an all-electronic patient health record,” said DATAMARK Marketing Coordinator David Peregrino. “Of course, this is not the case, because so much of the ‘patient narrative’ exists in unstructured form. We developed this white paper to show that true EHR systems require an ‘enterprise content management’ approach. That means capturing and converting this information to a secure, searchable and sharable electronic format that boosts the efficiency of an organization.”