After installing an electronic health record system, officials at CMH Regional Health System in Ohio still felt a gap in technology that was costing the hospital when it came to imaging documents - that is, until they discovered an imaging integration tool that turned everything around.
Back in October of 2006, CMH, a 95-bed hospital in Wilmington, Ohio, kicked off phase one of a three-year, $18 million patient-safety initiative that included a transformation to an electronic health record system.
As part of phase one CMH implemented McKesson's EHR solution and Optio's forms automation solutions, MedEx and MedForms, as well as Optio's DesignStudio.
Hospital officials however discovered that the EHR solution only accepted ascii or postscript documents to be coldfed, or imported, directly into the EHR. When the files were imported into the EHR record the formatting was lost. The data was there, but the original format was missing.
This created a twofold problem for CMH: it prohibited physicians from getting information into the patient record quickly; and it was a stumbling block towards their initiative to eliminate manual scanning of patient documents throughout the hospital.
"We were experiencing delays in getting the information scanned and into the patient's electronic record and delays in getting the information coded properly for billing," said Linda Keifer, CMH's senior Electronic Imaging and Forms analyst. "We needed to get that information into the patient folder more quickly, so we looked to Optio."
Due to CMH's problems, Optio developed an imaging integration solution that allowed patient documents from various ancillary systems to be viewed by physicians within the patient's folder, in its original format. Now when a physician opens a patient's electronic folder, the documents appear exactly as they did originally and don't require any additional interpretation.
CMH has realized significant cost savings due to Optio's imaging integration tool. "With our initial HeartLab system, we've saved close to $7,000, which we would have paid a third-party vendor to reformat the ancillary documents. The EKG system reformatting costs would have cost us close to $25,000, prior to Optio. If you add that up across cardiology, radiology and pathology alone, the savings potential could be close to $75,000 per year. For a small hospital like CMH, this is a significant savings," said Keifer. "But, our patients will receive the most significant benefit - they will receive accurate treatment faster than ever before."
Optio's solution has also saved the hospital time, saving their medical records staff approximately 10 to 20 hours per week for just the cardiology application alone. "It has definitely improved patient care for our hospital due to the fact that the physicians can read the documents and make their diagnoses faster than ever before," Keifer added. "With Optio, our physicians have everything they need at their fingertips to make the safest, most accurate decision about patient care."