With more than 15 years in health information management (HIM), Sandy Boyle has seen more than one cost-saving project in her time. So when her group began KATA training in March 2016, they identified a project: to reduce clinical scanning and paper by 50 percent to save costs, reallocate resources and encourage all clinical documentation to reside in the Baptist OneCare (BOC) Epic electronic medical record (EMR).
In March 2016 alone, clinical scanned documents across all entities totaled more than 700,000 documents.
Sandy, along with Jan Sitton, a systems business analyst; David Ortiz, a Baptist OneCare clinical analyst; and Terri Campbell, a business analyst with information technology (IT), began analyzing the current clinical scanning practices, starting with inpatient units and HIM departments. The team analyzed data, performed Gemba walks and pulled resources together from System HIM, Baptist DeSoto, and many other areas to review process and workflows targeted for improvement.
“What we first discovered was that there was definitely duplication. One example was nurses were printing two after-visit summaries, giving one to the patient and sending one to HIM —who scanned it back into the same system. These documents could be up to 25 pages per patient encounter,” said Sandy.
In a very short time, her group helped change the process. By printing only one copy and having a patient signature page as the first page, the need to print excess pages was eliminated and scanning was reduced to one page per patient encounter.
Her team also began reviewing all paper clinical documents and possible electronic interfaces with the end goal of BOC Epic containing all clinical data needed by the provider to care for patients. Another goal was to meet the HIMSS stage 7 guideline of providing all clinical information to the provider in electronic format within 24 hours.
After just three months, her team eliminated 300,000 pages per month, saving Baptist $7,000 each month across all facilities in paper cost alone.
In the future, her group will be working toward auto-routing EKG unconfirmed records via an interface to BOC Epic. Until then, Sandy knows one thing to be true.
“Everything we do, we should use the BOC Epic EMR system to record it.”