Walking into an inpatient room at the Surgical Specialty Center of Baton Rouge (SSCBR) is more like entering a spacious hotel suite than a hospital room. Designed with many of the comforts of home, each private suite contains a microwave, refrigerator, television and DVD/VCR player, along with a sofa bed for overnight guests. Of course, the best feature is the talented and dedicated staff that assists patients and family members with their medical needs.

“Most people don’t have pleasant memories associated with hospital stays: You’re sick, you’re scared, you’re away from your family,” says Shawana Rucker, IT manager at SSCBR. “SSCBR’s goal is to change all of that.”

Founded in 2003 as a physician-owned specialty hospital, SSCBR set forth to serve the needs of the local community. In 2008, the physicians partnered with Our Lady of the Lake Hospital and continue to provide a patient-focused facility serving the needs of the community. In this capacity, SSCBR is fully committed to providing the highest level of patient care. This commitment extends from architectural design to inpatient amenities, staffing and even medical records requests.

“As a specialty hospital, SSCBR uses the most advanced technology available to enhance the level of patient care—and not just in the operating room,” explains Rucker. “For example, Laserfiche gives us a user-friendly way to provide staff with instant access to the information they need to admit and treat patients. It also allows us to respond more quickly to patient requests regarding billing or medical records inquiries.”

Easy Road to EMR

With approximately 200 employees and a patient load of nearly 20,000 hospital services per year, SSCBR wanted to scan and store patient records in an electronic format, but its health information system (HIS) could not handle the high volume of content required.

“We’d only been open for a year,” says Rucker, “and we were already running out of space for record storage. We thought HIS would solve our problem, but when it didn’t, we turned to Laserfiche for help.”

In 2005, SSCBR purchased Laserfiche from JPI Data Resource, a Laserfiche reseller that specializes in healthcare deployments. “We chose Laserfiche because it’s so easy to use,” explains Rucker. “Although it doesn’t fulfill all of the government’s criteria to be considered a comprehensive EMR, Laserfiche has absolutely given us a centralized and secure way to manage our electronic records.”

To get records into the system, SSCBR uses Laserfiche Quick Fields, a high-volume document capture and processing tool. By automating the capture process as follows, Quick Fields eliminates the potential for keystroke errors when digitizing records:

• SSCBR puts barcodes on hardcopy medical records so that they can be easily scanned into Laserfiche.
• Quick Fields reads a barcode, automatically capturing important patient identifiers.
• Quick Fields automatically creates the folder structure and autofiles the patient’s scanned records.

“Laserfiche definitely makes life easier for our staff,” says Rucker. “It saves a lot of time on data entry with only minimal training. The only thing end users need to do in Quick Fields is tell the system where to store the records.”

In addition to simplifying patient records management, Laserfiche also streamlines admissions procedures by allowing SSCBR’s front-desk personnel to quickly scan and process insurance cards, driver’s licenses, patient history forms and more. Likewise, Laserfiche speeds the billing process by providing on-demand access to patient EOBs, claims and statements.

From a patient care perspective, Laserfiche enables staff members to locate medical records, admissions items and billing information within seconds so that they can answer patient inquiries faster. “Whether a patient is onsite or phoning in with a follow up question, our employees don’t have to search through boxes of paper files anymore,” says Rucker. “Laserfiche makes it fast and easy to keep our patients informed.”

Securing Compliance

As with any hospital or medical practice, protecting the integrity of patient information—and complying with HIPAA—is critical to SSCBR’s success. Laserfiche provides comprehensive security that protects sensitive information while still allowing authorized personnel to instantly access necessary files.

According to Rucker, SSCBR integrated Laserfiche with Windows Active Directory® to simplify the authentication process. “The IT department assigns Laserfiche rights and privileges to staff through Active Directory, which makes it easy for people to log into the system and easy for us to administer,” she says.

“We have role-based security in place. People in the admissions department see the admissions items. People in the business office see the EOBs. Clinical staff has access to the medical records. Most people have read-only access to the documents they’re authorized to view. With Laserfiche Audit Trail, we have the ability to run security audits, but I run them very rarely because the security controls are so good that people really can’t do anything wrong.”

What’s Next

SSCBR is very pleased with the benefits it has received from Laserfiche over the past five years. “The system is easy to use, it doesn’t require much training and it saves us a lot of time,” explains Rucker.

Moving forward, SSCBR is considering implementing Laserfiche Workflow in its purchasing department. Workflow enables organizations to automate collaborative business processes by designing custom workflows to fit their needs. A workflow automatically performs specified actions at appropriate times, such as sending a document to a specific user, populating a field, adding a tag or sending an e-mail.

According to Rucker, Workflow would deliver additional time-saving benefits during the procurement process, “especially for activities such as creating POs.”

At the end of the day, though, SSCBR’s investment in Laserfiche comes back to the standard of care. “Patient service is important,” Rucker concludes. “In that, we strive to be like a five-star hotel. Laserfiche helps us to operate more efficiently and effectively, and by accelerating our response to patients, it enables us to increase their comfort level as well.”

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Tags: Active Directory, EMR, EOB management, Healthcare, HIPAA, JPI Data Resource, Medical records management, Quick Fields, Surgical Specialty Center of Baton Rouge

Posted on Tuesday, March 30th, 2010 at 10:32 am under Customer Stories, Healthcare, Healthcare Newsletter. You can comment on this post.