Healthcare organizations know document management is an integral part to their success. Having a system that delivers information when clinicians and staff need it, improves patient satisfaction, and reduces operational costs is no easy task. Health Management Technology asked a roundtable of relevant solutions providers about their document management systems and the importance it plays in the health information technology field.
Epson America is a provider of high-speed document scanners that allow healthcare providers to maximize the efficiency of capturing information from paper for input into their EHR system.
How does your system improve workflow within the healthcare system/facility?
Document capture is most efficient when the information can be captured closest to the point of availability, such as when the patient hands over the document to their provider or when a signature is required on a printed document. With a very cost-effective portfolio, Epson allows providers to deploy lower cost scanners to more of those locations without an increase in total expense. Choosing a scanner that exceeds the performance required for the job at hand could double the total hardware cost.
What are the current challenges you are facing regarding document management? How are you solving these challenges?
Epson’s main challenge is providing awareness that there are better alternatives in scanning hardware. We advocate reducing the provider’s total hardware expense by taking the time to examine the volume and frequency of each workstation’s scanning and selecting the best scanner that meets those needs. Epson also offers the industry’s longest standard warranty to demonstrate that we are a very low risk alternative.
What kind of cost savings does your document management system yield?
Because Epson supplies drivers for models that are compatible with virtually all EHR software, the provider has the freedom to choose the lowest cost model that will meet the requirements of the workstation, so one facility can save thousands over a brand that restricts compatibility to only its more expensive models.
How does your document management system deal with security and compliance issues?
Epson does not store images in its scanners. There is no memory or hard disk that needs to be separated from the scanner when service is necessary. The controlling EHR software receives the image from the scanner, leaving no trace behind, unlike many multifunction printers that store a copy of the image, necessitating additional handling for service.
What new advancements or technologies are you implementing or planning to implement in your document management system?
Epson has recently announced a network-enabled scanner called the DS-780N, which has a touch screen LCD that makes selection of the predefined scan settings very quick and easy without having to touch your computer. Through these settings, the operator can scan to the desired storage location with only a few touches of the screen. The network functions allow sharing the scanner with multiple workstations, giving the provider the freedom to place the scanner in the most efficient location.
OnBase by Hyland solutions for healthcare makes information readily available to clinicians and staff within the healthcare software solutions they already use and know, driving improvements in patient care and service while improving medical data management and reducing operational costs.
How does your system improve workflow within in the healthcare system/facility?
OnBase solutions for health information management support clinical and administrative departments throughout the enterprise via automated workflows that ensure accuracy and efficiency. For example, organizations may automate the identification of external documents by type as they enter a queue and enter them into the correct business process management workflow. Through its integrations with more than 500 existing software systems—including electronic medical records (EMRs), enterprise resource planning, and homegrown solutions—organizations may establish a complete and secure patient record immediately available to authorized clinicians and staff. With OnBase, end-users remain focused on high-value tasks, not tedious, error-prone work. Managers have visibility into the processes within health information management and can track all productivity.
What are the current challenges you are facing regarding document management?
There is a whole host of disparate systems that hold clinical and administrative content within organizations, including EMR systems on the clinical side. OnBase has been essential in allowing us to sunset legacy systems and archive the data.
How are you solving these challenges?
Integrating with more than 500 applications, including Epic, TriZetto, Meditech, Cerner, Allscripts, McKesson, Lawson, PeopleSoft, and more, OnBase delivers the content providers and payers need within the applications they already use. By leveraging OnBase, organizations are able to unite the full patient record so that clinicians and staff can access the information they need at the moment they need it.
What kind of cost savings does your document management system yield?
OnBase functionality goes beyond the scan, store, and retrieve of enterprise content management solutions of the past. OnBase speeds processes and reduces costs by capturing important information into one system; managing data, documents, and processes; providing instant access to everyone who needs it, wherever they are; integrating with existing systems; providing visibility into processes and system performance; and securely storing, protecting, and properly disposing of information.
How does your document management system deal with security and compliance issues?
We take the utmost care and precautions in our security protocols and even go a step further to balance security with accessibility. OnBase provides the highest level of security available through native encryption and offers secure, role-based access to critical information when it is needed via mobile, on-premises, or in the Hyland Cloud.
OnBase solutions also enable compliance with HIPAA, Joint Commission, and CMS standards through audit trails and a secure centralized content repository.
What new advancements or technologies are you implementing or planning to implement in your document management system?
OnBase 17 is set to launch this summer and will have functional enhancements—especially the new user-friendly interface.
Ron Nielson, Vice President, Healthcare, Ricoh USA, Inc.
Ricoh offers a number of document management solutions; our portfolio is built on best-of-breed offerings with different capabilities that fit different situations. Which one we deploy depends on what an individual customer is trying to accomplish.
For instance, if a customer is trying to leverage document management across human resources and accounts payable, that would be one solution, while if the customer only needed a system to handle clinical information, we would propose another approach.
How does your system improve workflow within in the healthcare system/facility?
The nature of the improvements can vary from solution to solution, but in a broad sense, these solutions aim to aid the collection, dissemination, and availability of information to people where and when they need it to complete their function within a healthcare organization.
Given that Ricoh has worked in document and content management for decades now, we’re very familiar with workflow within the healthcare space. Whether it’s credentialing, HR, payroll, AP, or clinical areas, Ricoh is able to design and manage workflows that help make information accessible where and when it’s needed to help ensure better patient care and physician experiences.
We have solutions that can decrease the amount of human effort it takes to move an invoice through the payment process. They can automatically check for and request necessary approvals and check the invoice against other documents to make sure the numbers match up.
For HR or payroll documents, we have solutions to help acquire and process related information, such as vacation payout and requests, pay adjustments, and personal performance plans.
We know and understand the documents that go into credentialing and enrolling physicians on an annual basis, so our systems can be set up to automatically prepare documents to a degree that makes the credentialing itself incredibly streamlined and straightforward.
In the clinical space, documents need to be ready before patients come in for treatment so patients spend less time in waiting rooms. Patients’ lingering in waiting rooms and physicians’ changing availability can lead to cancellations and rescheduling of outpatient procedures. In fact, a client of ours has found that about 10% of outpatient treatment ends up getting canceled or rescheduled, and roughly half of those cancellations and reschedules never come back to the same facility for the treatment. That’s why it’s so important to manage and disseminate relevant documents effectively, taking care of things like prior authorization and medical necessity questions.
What are the current challenges you are facing regarding document management?
Many organizations are adopting digitization of records, but not embracing it. You hear the more extreme stories of healthcare organizations struggling so much with siloed information that in order to package disparate documents, they will print them out or fax them to themselves and then scan them back in to where they want them saved. That’s a waste of ink, paper, money, and time. Not to mention, it duplicates digital files already “somewhere” on the system. That’s a problem of information accessibility.
A lot of these issues—ease of access and siloing—are rooted in the diversity of where information comes from. Healthcare entities tend to have information coming in via different avenues—from faxes to mail to direct messaging—and in different formats—from paper to PDF to un-OCRed images. Identifying, collating, and ingesting that information in a way that makes it easily accessible by the people who need access to it, where and when they need it, is no small feat.
How are you solving these challenges?
We divide our document management approach into three areas: ingestion, identification, and access. A successful document management solution can ingest information from various sources (both sending methods and document types), identify its function within the organization and tag and transform it for appropriate electronic storage, and make accessing documents intuitive and quick regardless of location or device. That last step also includes allowing software to push relevant documents directly into necessary workflows—such as securing invoice approvals—to keep things running smoothly.
What kind of cost savings does your document management system yield?
You can look at cost saving in healthcare through three lenses—hard cost savings, soft cost savings, and averted potential lost revenue. Our solutions help drive hard cost savings by driving down print needs, help achieve soft cost savings by allowing workers to spend less time hunting down information, and help to avoid potential lost revenue by reducing patient wait times and improving patient experience. By reducing patient wait times and improving communications among physicians, nurses, and administrators, we can help drive down cancellations and reschedules through our solutions. And when cancellations and reschedules do happen, an organization’s preparedness and reputation for patient care can encourage patients to follow through on rescheduling with that organization.
Fujitsu Image Scanners provide onboarding of patient data for many healthcare facilities around the country.
How does your system improve workflow within in the healthcare system/facility?
Models like the Fujitsu fi-7160 are small enough for a desk and capture all patient records including thick driver licenses, insurance cards, and medical history forms. Data is then sent into the organization’s content management system (ECM), making billing, patient management, and information sharing efficient and automatic. From reception desks handling mixed batches to records departments that handle millions of documents a year, Fujitsu provides rugged hardware built for durability and high-speed processing.
What are the current challenges you are facing regarding document management? How are you solving these challenges?
Scanning workflows have certainly become more decentralized. It’s now part of everyone’s job, not just a dedicated individual; we see scanners on or near every employee’s desk. With this trend, simplicity has become a requirement to avoid costly training and support to a larger scanning workforce. At the same time, complex projects and document types make automation and ease of use more difficult to achieve.
To address the scanners’ wider use, all of our fi Series scanners support simple one-button scanning. Profiles can be made for common document types and workflows that save time and headaches for users and IT teams. We constantly develop our driver technology to produce clean images without operator adjustments—this includes removing unwanted watermarks and detecting important color on images. Automatically producing high-quality images is important to avoid re-scans and to facilitate processing in the ECM system.
For documents that fall outside the normal document types, we have added a new technology called Assisted Scanning which allows for operators to visually select the best image and then save to a profile. This technology has saved customers hours setting up profiles for challenging documents.
What kind of cost savings does your document management system yield?
Fujitsu scanners provide ROI in a number of ways. The durability and reliability of hardware and parts enable uninterrupted productivity. New Automatic Document Feed technologies reduce paper jams, and cameras and image processing allow optical character recognition for quick keyword search and retrieval.
Hardware aside, we are aware that the most expensive aspect of scanning is not the cost of the scanner itself or the consumable parts, but the labor running it. With this in mind, Fujitsu strives to make the scanning experience as easy as possible with productivity tools and software that decrease the learning curve for operation. Our service programs guarantee technical support and very little downtime, saving organizations from workflow interruptions.
How does your document management system deal with security and compliance issues?
Fujitsu makes every effort to protect patient records and privacy. Our fi Series scanners transfer and remove all scanned data in a first-in-first-out method that overwrites memory with each new data block and uses dynamic memory that clears with every power cycle. Fujitsu’s network scanner, the N7100, encrypts data for network transmission and overwrites storage blocks with random numbers once the images have been successfully transferred, providing both Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act compliance and customer confidence in the security of their scans.
What new advancements or technologies are you implementing or planning to implement in your document management system?
In our latest model release, the new ADF/flatbed fi-7700, we incorporated sets of guides that neatly feed and stack the scanned documents, decreasing the amount of time it takes to retrieve, organize, and file post-scan. We have added the capability to scan and crop documents without having to close the lid on the flatbed.
