North Shore Medical Center (NSMC), a member of Partners Healthcare, is one of the largest regional healthcare providers in Massachusetts. NSMC offers comprehensive health services to area residents through the NSMC Salem Hospital, a 284-bed community teaching hospital; the NSMC Union Hospital, a 150-bed, acute care community hospital; the NSMC North Shore Children’s Hospital; the NSMC Heart Center; the NSMC Cancer Center; the NSMC Women’s Center; as well as numerous physician practices. The Central Scheduling Office at NSMC is responsible for receiving and processing the many requests that come in each day for such services as MRIs, Cat Scans, and surgical procedures. Efficiently processing these requests is of paramount importance to such a large and diverse healthcare network.
Paper Processes Inefficient, Difficult
Prior to transitioning to a paperless workflow with Biscom’s FAXCOM Image Indexing solution, the Central Scheduling Office received scheduling requests to traditional paper fax machines. Scheduling office staff retrieved these paper documents, entered data from the paper fax into their scheduling application, and began the scheduling process. Once the process was complete, the scheduler then filed the paper documents to a file cabinet.
“The old process was really inefficient,” said Debra Murphy, Director of Patient Access for NSMC. “Our schedulers were routinely walking to and from the fax machine, and to and from file cabinets.” Not only was the scheduling process unnecessarily slow, locating past documents was also difficult. It’s common for the hospital practice to request a copy of the original physician’s request prior to performing the scheduled service. At best, such a request requires locating the paper documents in the file cabinet, and couriering copies to the practice. Of course, successfully locating the document assumes the documents were filed properly, which was not always the case. Recognizing the deficiencies with their paper processes, NSMC looked for a paperless solution that would process, store, and index documents efficiently.
Easier and Faster Workflow with FAXCOM Image Indexing
NSMC wanted to continue receiving scheduling requests via fax so that there would be no disruption in the way physicians’ offices communicate with the Central Scheduling Office. NSMC first looked in-house and discovered other hospital departments already using an enterprise fax server solution, FAXCOM Server from Biscom, Inc., for automated faxing of lab results, among other fax applications. NSMC contacted Biscom to discuss their need for a paperless workflow solution to receive, schedule, store, and index fax requests for medical procedures, and found a fit with Biscom’s FAXCOM Image Indexing solution.
Image Indexing is an image processing application that works with the FAXCOM Server solution. As faxes are received, they are presented to Image Indexing users for review and processing. Image Indexing supports multiple roles and responsibilities to facilitate multi-step workflows, and records all image processing activity to a SQL database.
“The Image Indexing solution has been an enormous success for the scheduling office,” said Debra Murphy. “It used to take 90 seconds, on average, to take a paper fax into the scheduling step of our workflow. Now it takes 10 seconds!” NSMC processes up to 1,500 images per day with FAXCOM Image Indexing, enabling them to schedule 500 appointments per day. NSMC currently has 50,000 images processed and stored.
Receiving, Processing, and Scheduling - All in One Interface!
With FAXCOM Image Indexing, the NSMC scheduling workflow is faster, more reliable, and completely paperless. Faxes from physicians’ offices requesting services to be scheduled are received to the FAXCOM Server, and delivered to the Processer role in the Image Indexing application. Each hour, the scheduling office assigns one person to this role with responsibility for viewing the fax image in the Image Indexing fax viewer, rotating the fax image to the correct position, deleting the image if it is a junk fax, reading the fax for several mandatory data points (such as the patient and physician names) and then entering these – within the same interface – into the Image Indexing data fields. Once completed, the fax moves to the next step in the workflow, and the Processor moves to the next received fax.
The other staff members work in the Scheduling role in the Image Indexing application. Schedulers read the data entered by the Processor, and begin scheduling the requested procedure in their Tempus (Quadramed) scheduling application. Each action in the workflow is stored in the SQL database along with the fax image and corresponding data.
Many Benefits to Paperless Scheduling with Image Indexing
The biggest improvement NSMC has realized with Image Indexing is efficiency: they can now schedule more appointments in less time. A second benefit is easy access to stored images. If a request is made for the original physician’s request for a procedure, it can be easily located. Because fax images and indexing data are stored in a database, they are easy and fast to retrieve. Image Indexing also benefits NSMC’s regulatory compliance efforts. Image Indexing assists in limiting access to healthcare documents, and maintains an audit trail on information access.
