The following case study looks at a leading hospital and what BRT is in the process of doing for them. This particular hospital like all major hospitals must manage unprecedented amounts of patient information while being challenged to reduce cost. Paper and electronic documents of all types are created and captured at every interaction with patients and benefit providers.

A two-hospital regional medical center with 1000+ beds invited leading content management vendors to present creative Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions, which would allow them to replace their ailing imaging system. They also required new functionality needed to help reduce administrative and operating costs, maintain regulatory compliance and extend new and creative solutions to patients and employees.

Challenges

Having supported the existing system since 1991, the management staff had a clear vision of what they wanted and needed in a new system. The existing system was limiting their ability to effectively manage the millions of documents and images spread out across the organization, and the work processes that they drive. For instance, the Accounts Receivable process was severely hampered by the current system. When insurance providers reimbursed the hospital for services rendered, it was common for them to combine the payments for several hundred patients onto one check. The challenge was the to determine what and how much the insurance provider actually paid and then post that amount to the correct account in the Accounts Receivable system. Due to HIPPA compliance issues, they could no longer use a patient's social security number to track patient billing. Therefore, there was no longer an easy way to uniquely identify patients across different service providers.

The current process included scanning the check and pertinent detail information and making the image available to the clerk so the correct amount could be posted. But the current scanning process was time consuming and not always accurate. THe current process also didn't take advantage of the newest techniques in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on documents that were scanned. So, the clerk wasn't able to search it for a particular patient name or service number. Thus it took the poor clerk hours to do a task that would take minutes if the document was searchable.

The Goals

Management's long term vision was to capture all of the various types of electronic content at the source, whether in paper or electronic format, and store the content electronically in a common repository where the data would be searchable. This repository would provide secure and immediate access to critical clinical and patient financial information campus wide, from a variety of points of access. Once the content was captured. management envisioned establishing business rules to drive the work processes, where content and work instructions would be routed to the appropriate staff members. The hospital's key goals were to:

• Replace the existing patient financial imaging system and lay the groundwork to install the new system to the clinical and business departments.
• Support the hospital's effort to improve and streamline its current processes by providing comprehensive workflow capabilities inside the new document management system.
• Improve the performance of the various scanners including support for OCR by either upgrading the software or replacing them.
• Utilize electronic forms for patient registration.
• Provide a fault tolerance and disaster recovery environment.
• Effectively leverage HL7 and CCOW standards.
• Achieve and maintain HIPPA compliance by tracking and archiving patient related content.
• Create a system that is highly configurable, with out extensive custom development.

BRT's Solution

BRT is rising to the challenge. The overlying theme of the BRT solution is to provide the hospital with a sustainable platform to allow them to capture documents and data of any type and store them in a single secure repository. Then as documents are received, they will automatically gets replaced in the correct workflow to be processed. This is a simple concept with high impact and ROI.

BRT developed and presented a solution based on Documentum's D5 ECM platform which provides unprecedented salability, security and flexibility as a repository. The solution includes integration with two unique third party solutions that allow for optimization of the capture and processing of scanned images and electronic forms.

BRT encourages the use of electronic forms wherever possible, as eForms offer distinct advantages over papers forms. Adobe's LiveCycle Forms Server fits the bill here. Adobe will enable this hospital to intelligently capture information and streamline form-driven business processes through automation. Whether users are online or offline, internal or external, Adobe LiveCycle Forms will allow the hospital to deploy secure PDF or web forms over any platform or device. This will eliminate the need to re-key patient related information.

The solution will be rolled out across the hospital enterprise in phases and will ultimately allow the hospital to centrally manage ALL patient records and other content types - including medical images such as consent forms. It will provide the hospital a single, unified web based view of patient information, previously unavailable from a single system. This will allow the hospital to reduce errors, collaborate on diagnoses and increase the quality of patent care through rapid secure web based access to all records for doctors and staff.

BRT provides solution consulting, project management and implementation services designed to provide an efficient and easy-to-use web-based content management system. Call BRT at 248-324-9775 and see what we can do for your healthcare organization.