Hospital Keeps Reliable Records With Paperless Document Management

Given all the documents generated in a typical hospital, managing the massive amount of information is no easy task. That's why the University of Louisville Hospital looked around for a document management solution. It found one with IMR's Alchemy software with the help of DigiStor, Inc., an IMR business partner.

The Alchemy software solution is a paperless way of managing documents. It allows the hospital to integrate and organize images, paper-based documents, forms, CAD/engineering drawings, enterprise reports, e-mail, and other data that is hard to access and utilize in a single, searchable location or repository.

Costs Cut By Thousands
The University of Louisville Hospital installed Alchemy Premium, Alchemy Web Server to allow access to information repositories via a Web interface. Twenty-one workstations were installed with the Alchemy extension to scan non-digital documents at its facility nearly three years ago. Since then, the medical center has saved thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours.

The first saving is in storage space. Staff members scan in approximately 350 documents per day into a number of databases, the largest of which is about 12 GB. The billing department used to have a 30-foot by 20-foot room devoted to file storage.

"We've saved thousands of dollars in storage costs alone," says Michael Boston, clinical system analyst at the University of Louisville Hospital. "We have to pay a monthly fee for a lot of the paperwork that isn't stored at the hospital. That fee is being reduced dramatically, now that new files no longer need to be stored at a remote facility." In addition, the employee who used to be in charge of maintaining the on-site storage area has been reassigned to other tasks, saving the hospital many hours of labor.

Faster Patient Care
The biggest overall benefits have been time and efficiency for hospital personnel. Physicians no longer have to wait hours for a patient's chart to be pulled from the medical record department to see what happened during the patient's last visit to the hospital. The billing office also uses Alchemy Premium to access patient records, including copies of patients' insurance cards.