Formed in 1998, CapitalCare Medical Group is a physician-owned medical practice with 27 medical offices across four counties in upstate New York, with central business offices located in Albany. (more…)

South Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (SEPT) is one of the largest and highest-performing national healthcare organizations in the United Kingdom. Providing services for people with mental health problems and learning disabilities, SEPT serves a population of 1.5 million across three counties, with over 3,500 employees and an operating a budget of more than $300 million. (more…)

Internal Medicine Center, LLC (IMC), a multi-specialty practice with 20 providers, is the largest independent clinic in Mobile, AL. Established in 1946, it’s also the oldest, compiling over 60 years of patient records.

With so many specialties—and specialists—IMC’s Board of Directors wanted to use electronic medical records (EMR) software to improve operational processes, encouraged by the promise of ARRA stimulus money to help fund it. But IMC’s Practice Administrator, Christine L. Holliman, CMPE, took a more pragmatic view of the situation.

“All vendors talk about the efficiencies of an EMR and the increase in the levels of coding that can be achieved from full implementation,” she says. “As my physicians are many different ages, the idea of transitioning to a full-blown EMR was daunting, to say the least.” (more…)

If you’ve been in business for more than 50 years, chances are you’ve got a number of time-tested best practices that help your organization operate efficiently. Such was certainly the case for Dallas Associated Dermatologists, a nine-physician dermatology practice that logs roughly 75,000 patient encounters a year.

“Since 1954, our physicians have been refining the way they keep track of patient information,” says Bill Duke, executive director of the practice. “Although we knew we wanted to transition away from paper charts, we wanted our electronic records to mirror the form and format of our paper charts exactly. There aren’t many solutions out there that are flexible enough to do that.” (more…)

Michelle Rosson, HIM director at the Regional Medical Center at Memphis (commonly known as THE MED), responds to her first interview question: “Why did we choose Laserfiche? Well, my file room was going to explode!”
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Caring for senior citizens can be challenging: chronic pain, decreased mobility and a dwindling social network are just a few of the issues that older people—and their caregivers—must contend with. The mission of CareLink, a private nonprofit organization serving central Arkansas, is to connect older people and their families with resources to meet the opportunities and challenges of aging. The agency accomplishes this by:

• Providing in-home services to help homebound older people live in their own homes as long as possible.
• Helping active older people stay fit, healthy and involved through senior center programs and volunteer opportunities.
• Providing family caregivers the resources and support they need to maintain their own lives while caring for older loved ones.

But with 19,000 clients, CareLink was contending with a challenge of its own: filing, storing and accessing customer charts and other documentation in a timely and efficient manner.
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When the average person thinks about the employees who keep a hospital running, it is doctors and nurses who immediately come to mind. But what the average person doesn’t realize is how much work it takes to provide those doctors and nurses with the information they need to provide high-quality care. This task, of course, falls to health information management (HIM) professionals, and when a hospital relies on paper records, it is no easy feat.

“I’ve been in HIM since 1986,” explains Patty Hall, privacy officer and director of HIM at Wythe County Community Hospital, a 100-bed facility located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwest Virginia, “and I have to tell you that having an electronic solution makes things so much easier.”
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Much has been made lately of the benefits that can accrue to healthcare providers through the use of electronic medical records. In fact, one of the major long-term goals of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) is to “initiate a process to computerize health records to reduce medical errors and save on health care costs.”

But medical records are only one area in which providers can reap the benefits of working with secure, digital files. For organizations such as Molina Healthcare, a managed care organization (MCO) serving low-income individuals who frequently depend on government assistance, implementing a Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) system to digitize and streamline the healthcare provider credentialing process has proven to be extremely valuable. (more…)