Inpatient Records Scanning Approaching 1.5 Million
In less than six months, staff in Health Information Services have scanned 1,476,343 sheets of paper from more than 20,000 inpatient medical records, and clinicians can view every one of these documents with a few mouse clicks.
This effort kicked off Jan. 30 as the hospital transitions to full electronic medical records to make the delivery of care safer and more efficient. “Inpatient scanning has proven to be a successful bridge to the full electronic medical record,” said Georgette Wilson, the manager of record completion, transcription and birth registry in Health Information Services.
The day after a patient is discharged from BWH, his or her paper records are scanned and viewable online on BICS, CI, LMR and any application that includes the CDR Results Menu such as CAS, OE Pod Monitor and eMAR. Requesting paper files from HIS (formerly Medical Records) is now a thing of the past.
“Nurse reviewers can analyze records from their desks, rather than requesting the paper record and coming to the HIS Department. Clinicians love it because the information is easily accessible online by multiple users at the same time,” she said.
Inpatient coding specialists can work remotely provided that they meet the telecommuting policies. They have on-line access to the scanned records as soon as the documents are scanned and indexed. The coding specialists assign ICD-9-CM codes for the diagnoses and procedures which provides data for bills, research and other regulatory requirement.
The remote access feature allows BWH to overcome the national shortage of qualified coding specialists. BWH has the advantage of being able to recruit farther from its main location. BWH has coders located in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Florida, Iowa and Massachusetts.
“The HIS scanning staff really stepped up to the challenge of learning a new set of skills,” said Wilson. “This is a huge success.”