Asante
Health system saves $200,000 in one year and cuts processing times 63% to 90% with Hyland’s Intelligent MedRecords.
Asante serves patients in nine counties in Oregon and California. The health system includes three hospitals, 40-plus primary care and specialty clinics, and more than 6,000 employees.
The expansive network receives and generates a lot of medical records paperwork — Asante processes about 1.5 million documents a year — creating a strong need for efficient workflows.
The challenge
Asante had a backlog of documents that eclipsed the combined height of two NBA players.
“During this time of backlog, we had clinics calling us asking us for documents. ‘We need this document in the chart now.’ We were spending 45 minutes to an hour, multiple employees looking for that one document through the 14 feet of paperwork,” said Tatum Beech, Asante’s supervisor of data integrity and health information governance.
The health system had separate teams — each with different workflows — for inpatient and outpatient scanning. Asante attempted to cross-train the groups, but it took six months to get one employee up to speed on the other team’s day-to-day work.
“Our turnaround times for scanning were horrible,” said Jeannie Warren, Asante’s manager of health information services and enterprise data governance. “Our clinic turnaround times were about four months out. For the hospital, we were about 30 days out.”
The delays impacted patient care and healthcare reimbursement.
We were spending 45 minutes to an hour, multiple employees looking for that one document through the 14 feet of paperwork. Now, after Intelligent MedRecords, we no longer have a backlog.
—Tatum Beech, Supervisor of Data Integrity and Health Information Governance, Asante
The solution
Asante selected Hyland’s Intelligent MedRecords (IMR) to automatically read, classify and extract data and integrate medical records within its Epic EHR workflow. The intelligent capture, extraction and validation platform sorts paper and digital documents, and drives the information into OnBase, a Hyland content services platform.
With IMR’s use of AI-based machine learning to automate classifications and extractions, Asante no longer has separate workflows. The health system has one team processing medical records, which is a huge improvement from the cumbersome setup of the past.
One of the biggest time-savers was the ability to create “on-the-fly” encounters in OnBase, based on data extracted from a medical record, rather than having to re-enter it into the EHR.
$200,000
Amount Asante saved in its first year with automation
90%
Reduction in the time it takes to process 20 pages of records
80%
Reduction in the time it takes to process a faxed document
The difference
No backlog: Asante’s initial IMR project involved AI-based machine learning classification of 66 document types. In fewer than six months, the 14-foot-high backlog of documents was gone.
Accelerated processes and reduced costs: In its first year with IMR, Asante saved almost $200,000. And the health system’s time savings might be even more impressive.
- Before automation, it took Asante about 19 minutes to process a batch of 49 pages. With IMR, it’s 7 minutes — a 63% reduction.
- A batch scan of 20 pages takes 45 seconds — a 90% improvement.
- A faxed document takes 30 seconds to process — 80% better than the previous total of 150.
Also crucial: Asante isn’t wasting time looking for medical records.
“We no longer have to spend time searching for records because we are within our 24-hour turnaround time,” Beech said. “As soon as that paperwork hits us, we have it scanned in and in the chart and available to providers within 24 hours.”
Improved insights and care decisions: The elimination of processing delays brings timely access to medical records and an enhanced ability to positively impact care decisions.
In the first year, Asante already had 21 of its 40-plus clinics on centralized scanning. The health system’s goal is to have every clinic on board within five years.
“I was a little bit skeptical — I’m not going to lie,” Warren said. “I didn’t think we would see the return on our investment as fast as we did, which was great. We did it a lot faster than planned.”
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