Optical imaging a boon for registration work
Optical imaging a boon for registration work
It also boosts customer service
A new optical imaging system for managing insurance cards is helping streamline patient registration and has eliminated time-consuming photocopying for other departments at St. Agnes Medical Center in Fresno, CA.
Because half of the patients registering at the facility’s outpatient center have been there at least once before, the department had been searching for a way to keep them from having to register every time, says admissions manager DeAnna Oliver.
Timeframe is less than a minute’
The new imaging system has helped address that problem, she says. Designed by Optika Imaging Systems in Englewood, CO, the system was installed by BMI Imaging Systems in Sunnyvale, CA, the reseller of the software. BMI also trained a small group of employees, who then trained their colleagues.
"On a heavy day, we have 400 patients in the outpatient center, and more than half are prescheduled, so we get all the paperwork done before they come in," she says. "With optical storage, we’re able to see if they have an insurance card [on file] and have a copy of the card and a consent form printed out and ready. The time frame in the registration area is less than a minute."
Goodbye to filing cabinets
For the first four years of the outpatient center’s operation, registrars filed photocopies of every insurance card that came through. "It was very labor-intensive," Oliver says. "[Registrars] were calling patients before they came in for appointments, and then the evening shift would go to the file cabinets and pull those cards and make copies. Now we have those files no more."
The medical center is able to keep about five years’ worth of insurance cards on line, says senior systems analyst Brad Bain. "It’s an optical jukebox with 15 platters on it the entire thing holds 20 gigabytes of data," he says.
In addition to eliminating an office full of filing cabinets, the system relieves registrars of having to make copies of the cards for the business office and other departments, such as the lab or nuclear medicine.
Financial counselors in the business office and other personnel at networked workstations can access the stored insurance card image electronically. They also can annotate that image, insert word processor documents into the patient folder, and scan in additional documentation without destroying the original image, Oliver says.
"Say someone spent a lot of time finding out where an account needs to be billed or getting information on deducti-bles. That can be annotated onto the image," she says. "[The system] has eliminated a lot of spatial constraints. Papers used to be sent all over the hospital. Now [that work] is done right on the computer."
The new admission system works as follows, Bain and Oliver explain:
Each patient-admitting workstation has access to the imaging system and is equipped with a compact document scanner. When admitters come to the insurance field on the computer screen during a registration, they can click to the optical disk and see what’s there while remaining in the admitting/discharge/transfer (ADT) program.
If the patient’s current insurance card is not in the file, admitters can scan the new document at their desks. Once they have verified the image on the display screen, they can click a box on the computer screen with the mouse to extract data automatically from the ADT session and insert it into the imaging system’s index fields. If time is an issue, Oliver notes, admitters simply copy the card and scan it later.
Updated patient insurance card records are accessible from any networked workstation and can be retrieved by hospital account number, patient name, Social Security number, or other data stored in the ADT system. When a patient presents for admission, a list of all scanned records for that patient indicates the insurance card number, visit date, and unique visit number. Multiple users can retrieve information from the customer file at the same time.
Now that the system has been in place for several months, admitters have become accustomed to it, but Bain and Oliver say there was some initial resistance.
"There was a mixed response at first," says Bain. "It was another process they had to do, and because they average about 400 admissions a day in the outpatient center, it was looked upon as another task."
Also, he notes, admitters weren’t involved in some of the back-end processes the system affected, and so they weren’t immediately aware of the benefits.
Part of the problem was that staff were faced with too many new things at once, including the implementation of a Windows software program, Oliver adds. It didn’t help that using Windows slows down the imaging system.
If you want to use the system in conjunction with Windows, she advises, "make sure the applications work easily."
One of the biggest pluses of the imaging system is in customer service, Oliver says. "The amount of paper shuffled from place to place, the repetition, and the waiting for someone else to bring something to you have made this an area that’s frustrating.
"Everything we do, we try to do ahead of time, to get as prepared before the visit as possible, and [with this system], we look prepared," Oliver says. "Patients for the longest time have said, You have all the information in the computer; why do I have to pull out my card?’ Now we really do."
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