Document Management Provides Remedy For Hospital Inefficiencies

Used with permission from Integrated Solutions magazine

An electronic document management system allows a hospital to enhance employee productivity and reduce expenses.

For CaroMont Health, an independent, 435-bed, not-for-profit healthcare system, offering healthcare services to patients is easy. Grappling with the documents pertaining to these patients is a far more difficult task.

CaroMont previously used manual document management methods to manage its large volume of paper. For example, the hospital alone services 600 patients daily; to achieve accurate accounting, employees must, at any one juncture, research, compile, and manage 5,000 to 9,000 patient documents. Additionally, the old process required CaroMont’s staff to photocopy written patient information that needed to be stored in patients’ files and to manually update that information. This was not only timeconsuming, it generated high labor, postage, paper, and toner expenditures.

Michael Johnson, CIO at CaroMont, and his colleagues decided a document imaging solution was the best means of trimming operating costs, increasing employee productivity, and ensuring that vital patient and organization documents could be stored and archived appropriately. Specifically, CaroMont sought an enterprise content management (ECM) solution that would provide a centralized electronic document repository from which employees could quickly retrieve documents of all types, from scanned images to electronic reports. The solution also had to integrate with the organization’s Siemens Medical Solutions INVISION HIS (healthcare information system).