Integration software saves thousands of hours
Integration software saves thousands of hours
Merger of facilities creates challenge for database
When St. Michael’s Hospital in Stevens Point, WI, acquired Rice Medical Center’s multispecialty practice — a 110,000 square-foot state-of-the-art clinic that housed more than 75 physicians — it was presented with the challenge of merging the clinic’s 140,000 patient medical records from Rice’s system into the hospital’s own MEDITECH system.
Because of the merger, the physicians would need only one identification number to reference a patient’s medical records; that would enable them to access patient information more quickly and also help ensure they accessed the right patient data — thus improving patient safety and confidentiality.
Before St. Michael’s began to manually merge the medical records, Tom Dobbs, program analyst, realized it might take as long as 1,000 hours, or one to two months, of manual effort for a data entry person to handle the task. Even worse, it could result in multiple errors, or their overwriting good data with incorrect data.
Dobbs, who already had been using software products from Sherborn, MA-based Boston Software Systems, learned that by using its Boston WorkStation software, the hospital could automate the entire process easily and save thousands of person-hours.
"We were able to quickly, efficiently, and accurately perform the process; just this one project alone has saved us more than $40,000," he asserts.
Time a major issue
Time was an issue not only because a faster process would save money but because of safety and efficiency considerations as well, notes Carol Wroblewski, an IT support analyst.
"In the electronic medical record, the patients would have been listed twice, so the doctor would have had to go into two different sources for information, which could have been a patient safety issue," she says.
"We’ve also used the software as a chart locator, and we’ve moved 12,000 charts from one type of [software] module we’re no longer using," Wroblewski adds.
St. Michael’s also was under the pressure of a timeline for going into a new billing system with unrelated databases.
"We needed the patient numbers merged into our system in a timely fashion," Wroblewski asserts. "We had to verify that all patient information was correct, so we would proceed without any AR [accounts receivable] increases."
Manual entry "would have taken thousands of hours," she asserts. "Instead, we ran the system during the night for three weeks, then checked the results."
When you break down the processes, adds Wroblewski, it saved about 1,200 procedures a day.
In all, the savings of time really were achieved from just two operations: merging the two sets of medical records and moving the patient charts, she points out.
"Now we run a script daily to load the billing information as an ongoing process," Dobbs notes.
That takes about 20 minutes a day, he says. "If we had to do it manually, it would probably take three hours a day of loading data entry."
Need More Information?
For more information, contact:
- Tom Dobbs, Program Analyst, St. Michael’s Hospital, 900 Illinois Ave., Stevens Point, WI 54481. Phone: (715) 346-5000.
- Carol Wroblewski, IT Support Analyst, St. Michael’s Hospital, 900 Illinois Ave., Stevens Point, WI 54481. Phone: (715) 346-5000.
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