THE CHALLENGE

The client began their work in the mid-20th century that grew over the years and through several incarnations into today’s state-of-the-art medical facility with adequate number of beds and physicians in different specialties. The client also offers medical education to students, interns, residents and fellows from across the country.

An enormous volume of paper medical records is a common problem for most hospitals with a long history of service in the community. Accordingly, the client’s HIM department was 100% paper. The HIM staff had long-established procedures for processing the paper records, but with all of the day-to-day demands of an HIM Department, it was always hard to get ahead. The inefficiencies of the paper system were typical: over-stuffed shelves, carts piled two feet high with paper records, staff working in storage rooms jam-packed with paper records, requesting records from the offsite storage company (“What do you mean you are unable to locate the file?”), tracking signed-out charts – just to name a few!