Case Study

In late 2006, Wyoming Medical Center implemented a document management system

from McKesson called the Horizon Patient Folder (HPF). The system was designed

as a first step toward electronic medical records. With HPF, discharged records are

scanned and indexed within 24 hours of patient discharge, eliminating the need for

paper storage; scanned records are destroyed 90 days after discharge, halting the

addition of records to the medical center’s Health Information Management Service

(HIMS). Users can retrieve images from a PC within seconds of a inquiry. Physicians

like the ability to complete records online and retrieve records from the hospital, their

office or even their home.

Once the process for scanning and indexing current records became seamless,

the hospital’s focus shifted to managing records discharged prior to implementing

HPF. The HPF system had enough storage space to hold all of the center’s old

and new records. Initially, Wyoming Medical Center’s HIMS hired temps to scan

the old records into the HPF system. But productivity was hindered by space and

budgetary constraints. While the hospital’s document management system used

three production scanners, they were only capable of imaging a maximum of 10,000

to 12,000 documents per day. What’s more, the process of guarding against doublefeeds

was laborious, requiring more time spent indexing records than actually

scanning, according to Nick Belveal, RHIA, director of HIMS, Wyoming Medical Center.

“Because our scanners were not good at detecting double-feeds, it was an extremely

slow process,” Belveal added.

At the rate it was going, it would take the center five years to scan all of its old records.

Worse, the piles of records were impacting the hospital’s day-to-day operations. “They

slowed down our operations tremendously,” Belveal said. “Loose-sheet filing by hand

is much slower than electronic filing. Plus, searching for records on foot can really be

slow with 5,000 feet of records.”

In an effort to increase scanning productivity, Wyoming Medical Center looked for

technology solutions. After an extensive search, the center selected the ImageTrac

III scanner from Birmingham, Alabama-based ibml. Designed for high-speed

scanning, the ImageTrac III scans about 257 documents per minute and 13,107 pages

per hour. Other features include barcode recognition, form recognition and ultrasonic

page recognition, which helps eliminate double-feeds. The ImageTrac III scanner

immediately stops when a double-feed is detected, preventing more pages from being

scanned. The hospital’s old scanners only beeped when double-feeds were detected

and often fed several more pages before the scanners could be stopped. This made

it hard to determine which pages were double-fed and which were scanned correctly,

requiring rescanning of the batch.

Belveal said the hospital chose the ImageTrac scanners because, “The speed is

impressive, the double-feed detector works well and the exporter makes it easy to

re-scan documents.”

The hospital expected the ImageTrac III to make a significant impact on the scanning

of its old medical records, ultimately allowing for the elimination of its temps within a

year, with long-term reductions in staff through attrition. ibml did not disappoint.