What You Should Know:
– A new survey conducted by Carta Healthcare reveals a critical issue within the healthcare industry: the overwhelming burden placed on clinical data abstractors. The national online survey was performed by Reaction Data, a market research firm focused on the healthcare information technology industry.
– The manual and time-consuming nature of data abstraction is leading to job dissatisfaction, reduced productivity, and increased errors.
Key findings from the survey include:
- High levels of dissatisfaction: 60% of clinical data abstractors reported being neutral, dissatisfied, or very dissatisfied with their jobs.
- Time-consuming tasks: Half of respondents identified hunting for data and data volume as their top challenges.
- Manual data entry burden: More than half of abstractors’ time is spent on manual data entry and extraction.
- Frequent errors: 70% of abstractors reported noticing errors or discrepancies due to manual abstraction.
- Openness to automation: A significant portion of abstractors expressed interest in automated tools to improve efficiency and data quality.
The survey highlights the urgent need for technological solutions to streamline the data abstraction process. By automating manual tasks, healthcare organizations can improve data quality, increase efficiency, and enhance job satisfaction for clinical data abstractors.
“These survey results further demonstrate that clinical data abstractors’ time, skills and experience are being wasted on manual data harvesting and entry when they could instead be applied to data-driven patient care,” added Dover. “It is also clear that these clinicians are eager to embrace automated data abstraction methods that deliver superior results faster at an overall lower cost to the organization.”