With 19 locations and a caseload of 4,000 patients per week, Ear, Nose and Throat Associates of South Florida is the state’s second largest physician group dedicated to treating disorders of the ears, nose and throat. Although the group has always provided patients with outstanding care, keeping patient charts up to date was becoming an increasingly significant challenge.

Most charts were stored in large filing cabinets in the group’s main office. Staff quickly filed charts before leaving for the day, resulting in frequent mistakes. Worse, staff lacked an effective method for tracking charts that had been sent to satellite offices, making it difficult to determine where a missing chart might be located.

“Because it took so long to find charts, we always had a large backlog of lab reports, test results, physicians’ notes and other documents we needed to file,” explains Jo Wells, the group’s operations director. “Physicians would become frustrated because charts often didn’t include the most up-to-date information. Our system clearly wasn’t working.”

The organization’s CEO, Todd Blum, first learned about Laserfiche at a meeting of the American Otolaryngology Association, and he immediately saw that it would help staff manage patient charts more effectively. Laserfiche stores both scanned and electronic documents in a central repository, where they’re immediately available to authorized staff members. To help staff get up to speed quickly, Laserfiche includes a number of familiar Windows features, such as right-click menus and flexible folder structures. Perhaps most importantly, Laserfiche readily accommodates additional users and high-volume repository growth, making it easy for organizations to roll the system out to new users, departments and locations.

Prior to scanning documents into the repository, Wells and her colleagues created a Laserfiche folder structure that mirrors the group’s current filing system. Each patient has his or her own Laserfiche folder, and the documents within each folder are organized by type. “Our paper charts had multiple tabs, such as ‘Demographics,’ ‘Office Notes’ and ‘Labs,’” Wells says. “Because staff already knew which documents appeared under which tabs, we decided to reproduce this structure in Laserfiche. Now, staff simply log in to the repository and browse to the documents they need—it’s like working with the paper chart, only much, much faster.”

When staff add a document to the repository, they also apply an electronic template, in which they record such metadata as the patient’s name, physician, account number and date of birth. They can also use templates to record and track more specialized information; for example, the group created a referrals template to capture each referral’s type, its beginning and end dates, and the number of authorized visits. All this metadata proves extremely useful for search purposes, allowing staff to quickly locate all the documents in the repository associated with a certain patient, physician or account.

Wells notes that Laserfiche not only helps staff and physicians simplify everyday tasks—it also helps them provide even better patient care. When patients arrive for an appointment, front desk staff use Laserfiche to quickly verify that the chart contains all the necessary information, from demographics to consent forms to insurance details. Prior to calling patients into the exam room, nurses use Laserfiche to review patients’ allergies, medical history and current medications. When physicians arrive, they review test results, lab reports and notes from previous encounters; they can also easily highlight important details and add notes for future reference. Finally, billing staff use Laserfiche to review insurance information and encounter details, which helps them promptly generate claims and respond to billing-related questions.

In the next phase of the group’s Laserfiche implementation, staff will begin scanning explanation of benefits forms into Laserfiche, further streamlining the collections process. In addition, physicians will create visit notes directly within Laserfiche, making them instantly available to other providers. And the group plans to expand its use of the Audit Trail module, which monitors all user activity in the Laserfiche repository.

Wells is pleased with everything the group has already accomplished, and she looks forward to continued success in the future. “Laserfiche has definitely helped us become more productive, and I’d recommend it to any healthcare organization. It’s clearly one of the best investments we’ve made.”

Tags: Audit Trail, Healthcare, medical billing, medical group, Surgical Center

Posted on Monday, December 8th, 2008 at 11:15 am under Customer Stories, Healthcare. You can comment on this post.