The Challenge
The Solution
The Results
With two acute care academic hospital locations, a behavioral health program, a long term care facility and multiple primary care practices, Truman Medical Centers (TMC) offers the largest inpatient and outpatient care for Kansas City hospitals. Steeped in Kansas City history with roots that go back more than a century, Truman Medical Centers is an academic health center providing accessible, state-of-the-art quality healthcare to the community regardless of the ability to pay.
Patient records properly disposed of
Saved in monthly storage costs
TMC was looking to implement a highly structured information governance (IG) program as envisioned by the information management department. This rigorous approach was needed in order to address the high degree of complexity and challenges associated with improving TMC’s long-standing records program. The underlying opportunities for improvement included solving for the lack of knowledge and structure regarding boxes, files, and their contents, across multiple departments. This challenge restricted the ability to defensibly dispose of information and created a burden on the ability to produce records in a timely fashion. Charts were pulled manually, which added to their overhead.
Furthermore, with the healthcare industry’s transition to Electronic Medical Records (EMR), a large subset of these patient files needed to be converted to electronic format.
With the design and approach in hand, Access was a willing and able partner in solving the intricacies and resource requirements needed to implement the new IG policy. This included solving for indexing and cataloging thousands of existing boxes across multiple facilities and vendors. Identifying records suitable for defensible disposition and shredding created a stable and sustainable model for future record additions. The volume of physical files and a rapidly changing healthcare environment presented a unique opportunity to work with Access’ document management solutions; including scanning, records storage, and secure destruction.
TMC and Access developed a creative solution that met TMC’s operational and budgetary requirements and created long-term value. This partnership enabled Access to differentiate itself from other options in the marketplace and solidify the foundation for a great relationship.
“We needed a partner who knew and understood our commitment to the community and was willing to work with us, financially. Access quickly became our one place to go for all of our information management needs. – Seth Katz, Associate Chief Information Officer
Through well-defined governance policies and procedures, the information management department has become the “backbone” of TMC, supporting the records and documents needed by several crucial disciplines within the organization.
During the project, approximately 1,000,000 patient records were properly disposed of through Access’ secure shredding services, the equivalent of nearly 30,000 record boxes. This reduction in physical inventory resulted in more than $5,000 in monthly storage savings.
The hospital staff now has the ability to locate and retrieve stored records back on-site and expedite delivery to their stakeholders. FileBRIDGE® Records software provided easy identification and retrieval of records, while the scan on-demand system provided speed and prompt delivery for all daily requests. Each of the benefits resulted from a searchable database customized to the organization’s specific needs.
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