IDN Establishes Document Consistency with
Better Version Control Management

Like so many healthcare organizations, document management was a nightmare at this 3,000-bed healthcare system.  With six campuses – each with its own culture—and thousands of preprinted forms in use, version control was impossible.  There was no standardization and there were serious questions about whether the most current, compliant documents were in use. 

The IDN was eager to tackle these problems and put a system in place that would address compliance issues and better assure the quality of care.  The data center had been responsible for supporting all of the preprinted documents in Registration—printing them and managing the print overlays. IT management wanted to get rid of that burden. They envisioned routing all information through a single system that would aggregate patient information with the proper design set and send it forward to the point of service where it was needed. Their goal was to decentralize printing, that is, to print wherever the patient arrived in the hospital.

Standard Register provided both the resources and the technology.  The transformation began with a comprehensive audit that eliminated duplicate and obsolete forms, and enabled the health system to standardize documents across all its campuses.  A daunting task, Standard Register’s team led the hospital staff through the process, lending their expertise and design assistance, and ultimately, new processes and technology were put in place.

Right Document, Right Patient, Right Care
SMARTworks® Clinical Enterprise is at the heart of the solution.  This application optimizes the design and distribution of patient data and clinical documents.  Located in the data center, it looks at requests from each campus and merges patient demographic information gathered in Registration with the electronic form templates.  It has the intelligence to route the right document with the right patient information and send it to the point of service, which may be a registration area or specific nurse’s station.

Fed by the HIS system, the application:

• Produces admission kits on demand, based on specific patient attributes, including necessary consents, and distributes them in the appropriate format to the correct location within the health network.
• Creates bar-coded patient wristbands and labels in the appropriate format to support systems and procedures throughout the hospital system.
• Facilitates on-demand printing of clinical forms from any treatment or testing area on any campus.

It’s an efficient system that dramatically reduces the opportunity for human error. It helps assure the right document is matched with the right patient so the patient gets the right tests, diagnosis and treatment.

A Single Hub for Compliant Forms
SMARTworks Clinical Enterprise is complemented by an electronic Forms On Demand (FOD) application, which is more than a library.  It mimics the EMR process, placing documents into the library and labeling them based on their procedural protocols with different hierarchies – it’s not just replacing a paper form in an electronic repository.

The FOD library supports the hospital system’s view that patient information and patient documentation are one and the same.  Besides, sending appropriate documents to Registration, it serves as a hub where clinicians can select the forms they need. In this environment, they can be confident that they are using the most current and compliant documents. 

An Effective Process for Version Control
The process of updating forms and controlling versions is dramatically different from days past when it took two weeks to verify and approve a form, and another five weeks to print and deliver it.  Now with documents available electronically, the process is truncated.  Once the new or revised forms are verified and approved, they can go immediately back into the system where everyone has access to the most current version.  Going electronic has eliminated a host of other hassles and costs, too  -- the tasks of purging and replacing preprinted forms, the cost of obsolete materials and the threat of non-compliant forms reemerging from hidden cubby holes throughout the hospital system.

Dramatic Efficiency in Registration
It’s been a successful implementation. SMARTworks Clinical Enterprise has not only fulfilled the IDN’s initial objective of improving compliance and version control, but it has also dramatically improved registration efficiency.  With their streamlined process, they have reduced registration time by an average of 12 minutes per patient.  Seeing more than 5,000 patients a day, that savings adds up to a 1,000 hours a day!   

Paving the Way to EMR
What’s more, SMARTworks Clinical Enterprise has been a boon to the Health Information Management (HIM) team.  By using double bar codes — one to identify the patient and one to identify the form — the application has introduced greater accuracy, security and efficiency to EMR. No longer do HIM personnel have to spend hours a day prepping charts just to get them ready for scanning.  Now documents are “scan-ready.”  Automatic indexing saves time and dramatically reduces the opportunities for human error by assuring that the right forms are indexed to the appropriate chart within their EMR.

For more information or assistance with document compliance and version control, contact Standard Register now.