The patient had just suffered his second heart attack.

The first had been about a year earlier. Doctors at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in San Francisco saved him then, with cardiac catheterization and angiography: Carefully, they slid a thin, flexible tube, or catheter, through an incision in the patient’s thigh, up through the femoral artery toward the heart. With dye and X-rays, they located areas of fat and calcium that blocked off the heart’s blood supply. Then they sent small, tough, balloons through the same vascular tunnel, and, inflating them at just the right spots, relieved the obstructions.

But that was nearly a year ago and 1,000 miles away. Now the patient was having his second cardiac episode-often a killer-and there was no time for another catheterization. His present doctor had to find out at once what the earlier cardiologist had learned. He made one telephone call and within 10 minutes, had in his hand a detailed report, 10 to 20 pages long, of the earlier physician’s observations.

While this case is fictitious, it is typical of what happens about 280 times a month, according to Denise Dyer, office manager at the Kaiser Permanente cardiac catheterization lab, which has just installed Laserfiche, a sophisticated system of document imaging, retrieval and virtually instant relay of data, from San Francisco to anywhere in the world. It often takes place in a situation in which lost minutes can mean lost lives.

With the Laserfiche system, developed by Compulink Management Center, Inc., of Long Beach, California, and installed at Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco by Unified Solutions, of Santa Clara, printed documents such as the cardiologists’s report can be scanned into an optical disk and retrieved in seconds. The process begins with an operator running the paper through a scanner, at a speed of ten sheets per minute. The data, now on a NetWare server, is then indexed under the patient’s name, hospital-admission and lab case numbers and a brief description of the procedure, and written onto a 5 ¼” optical disk.

The optical disk is one of 32 nested in a “jukebox” roughly three feet by three feet by two feet-the size of a small typing desk. The jukebox has room for 50,000 patient records, the equivalent of about 500,000 sheets of paper. And once a patient’s records are stored, it only takes a minute for an operator to retrieve and fax the data anywhere.

“We service approximately 15 Kaiser Hospitals and Medical Centers in Northern California,” Ms. Dyer said. “We have patients coming from all over the Bay area, from 60 to 80 miles away, for tests. The last figure I heard was 2.4 million patients. Now physicians in the outlying areas, if they don’t have a report, they can have that information as soon as possible. Especially when a patient winds up on their doorstep at midnight. It’s a situation in which speed really can save lives.”

Tags: health insurance, Healthcare, hospitals

Posted on Wednesday, March 24th, 2004 at 3:29 pm under Customer Stories, Healthcare. You can comment on this post.