The field of health data is growing by the minute. Patients want to understand and access their health records outside of the doctor’s office. This is much easier said than done.
Simply providing patient access to health records, across a span of electronic medical record (EMR) systems, is a challenge in itself. Even more challenging: attempting to translate those medical records into understandable and interpretive language.
Elaborate has built the solution for this problem.
An Interview with Nicole Bocskocsky, CEO and Founder of Elaborate
Nicole Bocskocsky is the CEO and founder of Elaborate, a health data company that makes lab results easy for patients to understand.
Her work is changing the landscape of what health data means for patients.
Continue reading for more information on Nicole, her work at Elaborate, and her partnership with us at Healthjump.
At Healthjump, we provide easy connection to EHR/EMR systems so you can focus on your product. Visit our product page to learn more.
An Introduction to Lab Results and the Patient Experience
As a healthcare executive at Parsley and Oscar, two market-leading healthcare innovators, Nicole has experienced the biggest patient and healthcare provider frustrations firsthand. Her motivation for starting Elaborate lies in what should be, but often isn't, a simple process: accessing and reading lab results.
When patients get their lab results, they often have to decipher the codes and terminology on their own. To do this, they may consult unreliable online sources, and often send themselves into an unnecessary panic. Alternatively, they may generally understand their results but aren’t sure what to do next.
In either scenario, patients are reaching out to their doctors to provide support in interpreting the results. Despite a doctor’s best intentions to respond to each of these inquiries with the care and attention they deserve, they do not have the dedicated time or support to do so at scale. As a result, patients receive canned replies, delayed responses, or no follow-up support at all.
This problem of in-basket management has been identified by independent sources as one of the top reasons leading to doctor burnout.
Nicole and her team of engineers, designers, and operators have built a solution to this problem – Elaborate.
Creating an Understanding of Lab Results
Developed with doctors, Elaborate is a platform for sending lab results that provide context and clarity to patients while connecting them back to their doctors for follow-up care.
When patients open lab results, they are often overwhelmed. There are many different terms, abbreviations, and variables that may appear in the results. Elaborate transforms this health data into actionable insights and gives patients clarity about what they need to do next to take charge of their health.
This in turn has the benefit for Elaborate’s doctor partners of eliminating rote admin work, so they can do more of what they love: caring for patients through meaningful face-to-face interactions.
In her interview, Nicole explains the benefits of a health delivery system like Elaborate:
“We’re helping our clients eliminate all of that unnecessary admin work that’s happening between doctors and patients when they go back and forth and trying to solve, asynchronously, the problem of poorly communicated data.”
Elaborate is the doctor-designed translator, using artificial intelligence (AI) and evidence-based guidelines from clinically reputable sources to translate lab results into straightforward language.
This eliminates patient anxiety or confusion from reading the results and minimizes the already extensive task list of healthcare providers to deliver high-quality follow-up support.
Interested in learning more about Elaborate? Visit their site here.
Health Data Start-Up Challenges
Simplifying health data is not an easy task. Nicole acknowledges that one of the biggest problems her team came across was trying to integrate Elaborate with various EMRs.
The answer was Healthjump.
With Healthjump, electronic medical record (EMR) systems connect with ease. Patients and doctors can access health records that come from different EMRs. Additionally, health data companies can integrate their product into many different systems so that they don’t have to just choose one and limit their customer base. This was why Nicole chose Healthjump – it was simple.
Struggling with your own health data interoperability? Take a look at the Top 5 Challenges with Healthcare Interoperability (And How to Solve Them).
What Makes Elaborate Unique
So, what exactly does Elaborate do?
Elaborate integrates with the EMRs and workflows doctors use today, with no additional clicks, tabs, or logins. Doctors maintain total control over labs, including what gets communicated to their patients and what they are prompted to do next. They order labs for their patient as they always do, and patients can go anywhere to get labs done, including onsite or at a third-party lab like Quest or LabCorp.
Once the results come back into the EMR, Elaborate becomes responsible for notifying the patient of the result, summarizing the key findings, and routing the patient into clinically-necessary next steps, including scheduling a follow-up and repeat testing.
For patients, Elaborate:
- Interprets the results to summarize the key clinical findings
- Aggregates historicals to compares current results to the past to surface health trends
- Turns incomprehensible acronyms into simple language with human-friendly explainers
- Provides information on what the patient should do next (and sends them reminders)
The last point may be one of the most important. Often, after getting results, patients are unsure as to what they should do. Do they go see their doctor again, get repeat testing, or do they go to a specialist? Or maybe all that’s necessary is a supplement or a new nutritional regiment.
Elaborate surfaces these next steps and automate reminders to ensure the patient is following up on the doctors’ next steps. With Elaborate, patient adherence to next steps increases by 4x, significantly impacting a doctor’s ability to influence clinical quality outcomes.
Improving the Algorithm
There’s no question that lab results must be interpreted by a doctor. Elaborate was developed with doctors as a way of easing their workflow, not bypassing or replacing them. Elaborate’s primary focus is guiding patients through understanding their lab work - to achieve this goal, the team has developed an underlying engine to surface key findings.
Nicole describes how a team of doctors and engineers partnered to design the initial algorithm based on “evidence-based medicine and standards of care within primary care.” This work involved leveraging Natural Language Processors (NLP) to parse through clinical data to identify potentially significant findings that should be incorporated within the underlying algorithm.
Of note, Elaborate offers a fully customizable offering for its clinical practice partners, enabling custom logic to be implemented on top of the standard Elaborate algorithm.
This ensures that Elaborate preserves the nuances of how that practice interprets health data and routes patients to next steps. For example, with practices that are functional or integrative in nature, the engine is often customized to surface insights more proactively to patients.
Elaborate is a doctor-developed software that constantly incorporates feedback from practice partners.
If a doctor sees that a recommendation was made on a patient's results that they don’t agree with, they relay this back to Elaborate and a clinical determination is made within 48 hours. This information is then used to train the algorithm to new levels of precision.
Elaborate and Healthjump
Healthjump simplifies the process of creating a product that is informed by health data. Because Elaborate partners with Healthjump, the workflow is frictionless.
Here is what Nicole has to say about her partnership with Healthjump:
“We knew our core focus was around this insights layer. That’s really our core IP and our product. We knew that was an opportunity for us to outsource to someone who is building [ connections to EHR/EMRs ] as their product. On our side, it allowed us to unlock all of our time and resources to focus on this underlying algorithm.”
Nicole and the team at Elaborate are bringing clarity and ease to health data, shining a light on the insights that matter. They help patients understand what their results mean and what to do next, freeing doctors to focus on their calling. As a leader in leveraging health data, Elaborate has introduced a new way for healthcare organizations to improve the quality of care, increase patient satisfaction, and decrease the admin work that leads to doctor burnout.
Healthjump understands that the more interoperable the health data industry is, the better patient care becomes. Contact our team to find out how we can help your product reach a new level.
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