February 4 is World Cancer Day. For most of the world, it’s a day of awareness. But for those of us in healthcare, it’s a reminder of the patients we didn’t see this year.
It’s a reminder of the mammogram that got rescheduled and forgotten. The colonoscopy referral that got lost in a stack of papers. The cervical cancer screening that happened at a different clinic, leaving you in the dark about the results.
The statistics are heavy. According to the CDC, roughly 1 in 3 adults are not up to date on their colorectal cancer screenings. That is a massive blind spot.
When we talk about “closing gaps in care,” it often sounds like an administrative box to check for value-based care. But we know better. A closed gap represents a patient who might have just caught a diagnosis early enough to survive it.
The problem hasn’t been a lack of effort; it’s been a lack of visibility. You can’t close a gap you can’t see.
The “I Thought You Did That” Dilemma
We’ve all been in this scene: A patient sits on the exam table. You glance at their chart. The “Alert” icon is flashing red for a missed breast cancer screening.
“Mrs. Jones,” you say, “I see we still need to get that mammogram scheduled.”
She looks confused. “Oh, I did that in November. My gynecologist across town ordered it. Everything came back normal.”
Now you’re stuck. Do you trust the verbal report? Do you spend 20 minutes asking your front desk to chase down a fax from the other office? Or do you order a duplicate test, frustrating the patient and driving up costs?
For Edward Maule, CIO and CISO at Advocare LLC, this wasn’t just an occasional annoyance—it was a systemic blockage.
“Our challenge had been two of the largest hospitals we worked with,” Edward explains. “We were getting virtually no medical records… literally hundreds of thousands of patients were being seen at those hospitals. Obviously, this is very problematic and made it very difficult for us to treat those patients effectively.”
Edward was hearing it constantly from his doctors. They were flying blind. They knew their patients were receiving care elsewhere, but without medical record retrieval, that data was locked in a black box.
Turning on the Lights with PRISMANet
Edward didn’t need a complex overhaul; he just needed a way to open the door between his practice and those large hospital systems.
To bridge this gap, Edward implemented PRISMANet, a solution that allowed Advocare to connect directly to the Qualified Health Information Network (QHIN). This move instantly connected Advocare to the external hospital systems they had been struggling to access, effectively dismantling the data silos that were hindering patient care.
The impact was immediate.
“The next day, my phone started to ring. The doctors were so—what did I do? They wanted to throw me a parade,” Edward laughs. “Because all of a sudden, all these medical records were now available, and it was life-changing for them.”
This is the power of PRISMA for Clinical Insights. It bridges the gap between external data and your immediate clinical needs.
By utilizing a patient information search engine like PRISMA, Advocare’s providers stopped guessing. They could suddenly see discharge summaries, imaging reports, and screening results from external networks right within the patient’s chart. Watch Edward Maule share his full story on how instant access to these records transformed their daily workflows.
From “Too Much Data” to Actionable Insights
While Clinical Insights handles the structured data, what about the narrative? When you are trying to close gaps for thousands of patients, you don’t have time to read every line of every imported CCDA or hospital discharge summary.
For Dr. Davey M. Perrin at Blue Bonnet Family Medicine Health and Wellness Clinic, the sheer volume of incoming records was a bottleneck.
“Before implementing AI assistant for PRISMA, it would take several minutes to view what the patient was seen for with the long hospital discharge summaries,” Dr. Perrin explains.
By using PRISMA AI, his practice transformed that “data dump” into a clear, usable narrative.
“Now, with AI assistant, we receive summarized bullets highlighting key patient information and data,” Dr. Perrin says. “I’ve also caught issues in the discharge summaries at the point of care and made corrections to treat the patient properly. The AI assistant for PRISMA shows us exactly what we need when we need it.”
This efficiency doesn’t just save minutes; it allows providers to see more patients and catch critical details—like missed screenings—that might otherwise be buried in the text. Read more about how PRISMA AI is pioneering value-based care.
Don’t Let the Year Slip By
World Cancer Day is a call to action. The gaps in care that exist in your patient population aren’t just statistics; they are ticking clocks.
The technology to find these missing screenings exists. As Edward Maule advised, “If you’re not enrolled, get enrolled. There’s no downside… There’s a night and day difference in the amount of records that you’re going to get.”
Whether it’s turning on EHR Data Aggregation to find lost records or proactively identifying who needs a mammogram this month, PRISMA for Clinical Insights is ready.
Let’s make this the year we stop guessing and start knowing.