Data Capture: Success In Healthcare

By Vicki Amendola, Integrated Solutions magazine

Companies across all vertical markets continue to realize the benefit of transforming paper documentation into digital data. The reasons cited most often include increased efficiency, reduced storage requirements, and even compliance. These same reasons impact the healthcare market as well, perhaps even more so, since having consistent access to the right information at the right time can have an impact on a positive patient outcome. Today, EHR solutions — essentially patients' medical records in digital, rather than paper form — can provide physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and other clinicians with access to critical patient information almost instantaneously.

Spectrum Health has been systematically deploying EHR solutions across its locations and departments for nearly a decade. Although that may seem like a long time, it isn't when you take into consideration the fact that Spectrum Health is the largest nonprofit health care system in western Michigan, consisting of 7 nationally accredited hospitals, more than 140 service sites (such as urgent care facilities), and a network of primary care physicians. To put the organization's size into human perspective, last year Spectrum maintained 1,820 licensed beds (for inpatient services), had 62,000 acute care admissions, and 8,400 births. Spectrum's HIM (health information management) team had been continuously ratcheting down the amount of information still captured on paper over the past several years, yet four critical patient care areas remained — ambulatory surgery, observation, inpatient, and emergency. To fully leverage the benefits of an EHR, Spectrum launched a document imaging initiative designed to capture and classify the information these departments collected on paper for assimilation into the healthcare provider's EHR system.