Founded in 1973 to serve the residents of California’s North San Diego County, Tri City Emergency Medical Group has a long history of enhancing patient care through the development and use of state-of-the-art technology. Full story »
Northern Michigan’s Muskegon County Community Mental Health Services (MCCMHS) implemented its Avatar practice management system back in 2003 to automate electronic health records (EHR). Although the Avatar system had a document imaging module that could digitize the patient histories, lab reports and documents that would always require doctor and patient signatures, several of the county’s non-clinical departments—including HR and Finance—were also contending with overflowing file cabinets and rising storage and handling costs.
Rather than implementing separate solutions for the clinical and non-clinical sides of the house, MCCMHS officials recognized that enterprise content management (ECM) would be the most efficient and cost-effective way to answer its document-related challenges. Full story »
Eastmont Towers, a continuing care retirement community in Lincoln, NE, offers multiple levels of care and a range of services between five buildings on two campuses, which leads to multiple levels of information management challenges. Full story »
While the restaurants and vineyards of the North East Victorian town of Rutherglen are key elements of the town’s economy, it’s the not-for-profit Indigo North Health organisation that promotes the community’s health and wellbeing. Full story »
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. Full story »
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.” Full story »
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.” Full story »
Physicians Professional Services (PPS) is a medical billing company that serves Boston-based Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), one of Harvard Medical School’s major teaching hospitals. Founded in 1994, PPS has grown to encompass 30 full-time employees serving 450 physicians servicing eight different departments within BIDMC, including:
Prior to implementing Laserfiche in 2007, PPS’s manual cash posting process was paper-driven. But from an operational and cost perspective, paper wasn’t a particularly efficient medium for PPS; even assigning the daily distribution of work was time consuming because someone had to manually review that day’s lock box payments and portion them out to the processors. Full story »
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:
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. Full story »
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.” Full story »