When the largest health system in the western United States quadrupled the number of locations it supported, it centralized administrative operations to improve efficiency in its newly acquired markets. During the transition, it was vital for their medical record indexing process not to slow down, but the sheer volume of indexing would require too many resources and more space than was available.
They discovered a solution that not only improved indexing speed and accuracy but also relieved their document backlog and saved thousands of hours in indexing scanned and e-fax documents. Implementing DISC SmartFiler enabled this health system to execute a more aggressive strategy to bring their clinics into a centralized workflow.
The Pains of Backlogged Document Indexing
Even before the restructuring, this health system was managing nearly 4,000 pages of clinical and administrative documents each day (150,000/year). Documents typically took 1-2 weeks to be indexed to the patient record, leading to a bottleneck that was felt throughout the network.
Administration staff spent hours looking for missing patient documents. Caregivers were at greater risk of making errors due to missing critical patient data. Patients were waiting longer to receive critical care.
They decided to move their clinics to the newly created Central Operations Department. By the time all 13 clinics had joined, the number of additional support staff needed to manually scan, index, task, and close orders was no longer feasible.
DISC SmartFiler Improves Indexing Speed and Accuracy
They looked for a technology partner to help automate manual tasks associated with medical records indexing and discovered SmartFiler by DISC. Each clinic was put onto SmartFiler, which allowed Central Scan to manage the increased volume with a much smaller team. Since implementing SmartFiler, they quadrupled the number of clinics supported by the central team and increased the document throughput tenfold, from 1 million to 4.5 million per year.