UNC Health

The fast-growing health system partners with Hyland to improve operational efficiencies, expedite workflows and reduce costs.

The challenge The solution The benefits

The challenge

The growth of UNC Health and its acquisition of many hospitals and clinics created IT management complexity and resulted in lost time searching for data for both clinicians and staff. UNC Health’s consolidation to an Epic EMR gave clinicians access to structured data, but did not address access to medical images, medical device reports, EKGs, clinical consult notes and more. That information was siloed in PACS and document management systems across numerous facilities. This created challenges for patient records lifecycle management, business continuity and disaster recovery planning.

The need to capture, index and rekey data from patients, providers, payers, vendors and employees also created a drain on staff time and hampered processing speed in multiple departments, including accounts payable, human resources, HIM and the revenue cycle.

UNC Health wanted to deliver on its vision of “One Patient, One Chart.” They also wanted to remove tedious manual processes, enhance collaboration and improve operational efficiency across the enterprise.

We wanted to create a seamless image viewing experience for our physicians, so that it didn’t matter if a doctor was looking at a patient image in our community hospital or our main academic campus.

— Vineeta Khemani , Director of Information Services Division Architecture and Clinical Systems at UNC Health

The solution

After reviewing multiple vendors, UNC Health chose Hyland for the ability to capture, index and unify access to documents, media and images for integrated use within the EMR, ERP and HRIS workflows.

Matthew Castellano, System Executive Director for IT, Business and Revenue Cycle Systems and Innovation, UNC Health noted Hyland offered solutions that were extensive and scalable across many enterprise use cases, which drives investment value.

"On the clinical side, UNC eliminated silos of medical images stored in PACS at multiple facilities by implementing a single clinical image repository with Hyland’s Acuo vendor neutral archive (VNA) and enabled universal access within Epic workflow through the NilRead diagnostic viewer. We have eliminated nine PACS and three reporting systems," said Vineeta Khemani, director of Information Services Division Architecture and Clinical Systems at UNC Health. "This not only results in hard cost savings, but also reduces annual support and enhancement costs."

UNC Health also stored and indexed EKGs, consult notes and other unstructured patient documents through Hyland’s OnBase content services platform and delivered the documents within patient context for use within the Epic EMR workflow. With the Epic EMR and Hyland’s enterprise imaging and content services integration, UNC Health achieved its One Patient, One Chart vision.

Notable patient-centered benefits have also been attained. For example, the tight integration between the imaging system and the EMR means that DVDs no longer need to be burned in order to share images from one UNC Health facility to another. Instead, images are electronically available enterprise-wide, almost in real time, which accelerates physician consults and reduces instances of unnecessary repeat imaging tests.

UNC Health further leveraged Hyland Healthcare content services platform to improve operational efficiencies, expedite workflows and reduce costs. UNC Health added document capture, machine learning classification, extraction of data and automated workflow to its enterprise resource planning space to improve its clean pass-through and invoice-processing rates.

"In AP, we’ve eliminated steps needed to rekey data because we’re extracting data via OCR (optical character recognition) and passing that through interfaces, so we don’t have individuals reading through paper and rekeying data to associate unstructured data with the corresponding purchase order," Castellano said.

UNC Health’s best practice uses of technology has supported their digital transformation and Stage 7 achievement of three HIMSS analytics domains, including the Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model (EMRAM), Outpatient Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model (O-EMRAM) and the Adoption Model for Analytics Maturity (AMAM). The EMRAM certifications reflect the highest level of completeness, governance, privacy and security, analytics and disaster recovery planning around electronic medical records an organization can attain. UNC is also expected to among the first to achieve Stage 7 for HIMS Digital Imaging Adoption Model (DIAM).