The American Red Cross says giving blood is giving life, yet the professionals overseeing this all-important act of charity at the Stanford Blood Center spent half their time transporting paperwork from place to place.

Then they got Laserfiche.

“You can’t imagine how much time this saves us,” says Medical Records Supervisor Brenda Glover. “Four hours a day, at least.”

That’s because the Stanford Blood Center is not your average blood bank and the people who donate there are not your average donors. Each year, tens of thousands of donations are made there, many by donors who extend their arms for others up to a dozen or more times a year.

The Blood Center’s donors are dedicated donors who often give just a portion of their blood called the platelets, which are vital for cancer victims undergoing chemotherapy. With the platelets removed, the rest of the blood is returned to the donor’s body, enabling them to donate again much sooner than if they had donated whole blood. Some of them have donated up to 500 times, according to Glover, who has donated her own blood 68 times.

“For a blood bank to be a success, it has to have repeat donors,” Glover says. “These donors are very dedicated, and they are usually back within one or two weeks.”

Unfortunately, this act of charity comes with a price: paperwork, and lots of it. The Blood Center can’t determine if it’s safe for a donor to give without knowing first a lot about that individual’s health history and past donations.

Each donation requires filling out a history card, whether it’s an individual’s first or fiftieth time at the Blood Center. These cards provide vital details which may affect an individual’s eligibility to donate. Staff then have to make sure that information is complete and has been reviewed by the medical professionals drawing the blood before any donations can be collected.

Before Laserfiche, paper history cards were filed in Glover’s office. Whenever a repeat donor came into one of the Blood Center’s collection locations, Glover’s staff had to pull that individual’s file down, package it, deliver it and then pick it again at the end of the day. They went through the same process even when there wasn’t a donation being made, such as when a doctor just needed to update a file, investigate past donations or double check information.

“Then there are the calls we’d get every day looking for special requests for these documents just for history information add-ons,” Glover says. “It was just a big, long drawn out process for each donation.”

With 55,000 to 60,000 donations annually, Blood Center staff spent much of its time hand-delivering paperwork around town. The Center bought its Laserfiche license and had the software installed last year, but needed a new server to really get up and running.

When that server arrived this year, all the Blood Center’s computers at remote collection locations were networked into the Laserfiche system at on-campus headquarters. Since staff began scanning all new history cards and back-scanning the old ones, they’ve begun to realize the labor savings tens of thousands of Laserfiche customers across the country have enjoyed for years.

Donor documents scanned into Laserfiche are now instantly available for nurses in the satellite offices through a password-secured Website. When a donor walks into one of the remote locations, a number assigned to his or her file is typed in and the person’s entire donation and health history is instantly available.

“We’re no longer pulling files down and putting them into a bucket to be sent out to the donor locations,” Glover says. “And we don’t have to wait for the charts to return or wonder where the charts we’ve already sent out are. If a doctor needs a chart right away, we’re not scrambling around. Thanks to Laserfiche, doctors can access these charts without any waiting.”

This is particularly helpful, Glover says, when it’s discovered after a donation is made that reporting inconsistencies on the history files should have disqualified a donor. Time is a factor in such cases, and accessing information instantly is a huge help. Staff can also scan documents from histology department and e-mail the images immediately if the Blood Center’s director is out of the office and in need of information.

Once the cards are scanned into the system and the images are inspected for accuracy, the hardcopy is sent off site and eventually destroyed, so Laserfiche is not just freeing up time, it’s also freeing up space.

So, what is Glover doing with all her free time now that the Blood Center has Laserfiche? What every other Laserfiche customers does once they’ve got their system in place—expanding its use into other areas of office operations.

“Soon we’ll be moving into employee records, machine maintenance records, and contracts procurement,” she says. “Anything that can be filed into a filing cabinet will be going into Laserfiche.”

Tags: Healthcare, WebLink

Posted on Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 8:57 am under Customer Stories, Healthcare. You can comment on this post.