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The Importance of Finding the Facts in Medical Data

Jun 13, 2022

3 min read

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June 13, 2022


Meet Jeremie: an orthopaedic trauma and spine surgeon who doubles as the enterprising Co-Founder of SiftMed. As part of his practice, he has established himself as a medico-legal expert. This means that when Jeremie isn’t working at the hospital, he is often hired by lawyers and insurance companies to give his expert opinion on personal injury cases. 


Rewind time. During his early practice, Jeremie worked in California. One medico-legal case which helped shape his vision for SiftMed was when he took on the case of Martin. Martin was a young man who was involved in a major motorcycle collision. He was transported to the hospital urgently, and underwent a series of operations. Upon regaining his whereabouts, Martin notes that he is unfortunately no longer able to move his legs. He is paralyzed from the waist down. When trying to determine the cause of his injury, Martin states that he remembers being able to move his legs for the first few days of his hospital stay.


Initially, the assumption is that the injury to his spinal cord occurred during the accident, and the matter is dismissed. Upon further investigation, deep down on page 13,151 of the medical record, there are three entries in size 8 font from the ICU nursing notes which clearly state that Martin was indeed able to move his legs for the first three days following his arrival at the hospital.  Only after a surgical complication did Martin suffer a spinal cord injury. That one piece of information was a key piece of the puzzle which allowed Jeremie to accurately build his report and help provide objective facts to the courts in order to allow them to reach an fair and accurate conclusion.





According to the American Medical Association (AMA), 1 in 5 claims that are submitted are not processed accurately, resulting in slow, erroneous patient support.


If Jeremie had missed even this one line, the outcome for Martin would have been completely different.


Finding this key piece of information took Jeremie multiple days while he relied on a highlighter and sticky notes to comb through mountains of documents.


Whether you are a physician, claims adjuster or lawyer, reviewing medical files for the facts can be a lengthy and tedious process. Here’s why. In order to formulate an opinion, Jeremie receives a full copy of the patient's medical records - typically involving thousands of pages of data which include medical history, doctors orders, MRI reports, duplicate copies and other expert testimonies. This information must be sorted, organized, and presented in a coherent manner before Jeremie can even start to understand the file.  


Fast Forward to 2020. Jeremie was spending between six to eight hours or more on each case and was doing ten or more cases each month. That is significant time spent hunched over a mountain of paper searching for the one clue.


He knew there had to be another way. 


That is where his partnership with Holly, as Co-Founders, came to be. Holly has ten years experience in growing and scaling technology companies. Together they envisioned a platform designed to transform medical file processing, to make medical files smarter and more usable.  


Today, SiftMed can process those 20,000 pages of medical records, eliminate the duplicates, sort, and organize them in a chronological view so that Jeremie is quickly able to search for that key piece of information and find the facts of the case.


This saves Jeremie 40% of time that was spent reviewing data and making sure key information wasn’t missed. SiftMed will allow Jeremie and others to more quickly and accurately review and process medical data so their opinions are better informed and more timely.

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SiftMed is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) processing software that organizes, categorizes, and analyzes medical files. With a mission to help find facts that can change lives - the company is currently focused on improving access to critical information that helps medical experts to quickly and accurately find key hidden facts in their data.

Jun 13, 2022

3 min read

0

72

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