Sulphur Springs, Texas - (14 August 2008) Access, the leading provider of electronic forms and workflow solutions for the healthcare industry, today announced that Mercy Regional Health Center (MRHC), based in Manhattan, Kansas, is enhancing its Electronic Medical Records (EMR) plan with the Access Patient Flow System (PFS) electronic forms management suite.
Managing paper forms incurred high costs from a third party vendor, require time-consuming manual tasks and created potential for inaccurate information on forms. After a thorough market analysis, MRHC chose an Access to solve these problems.
“We recognized that a forms automation system could deliver greater return on investment for our EMR project, and the solution from Access was the perfect fit,” said Ron Olsen, IS Coordinator at MRHC. “It gives us the ability to replicate any paper form, to quickly create new forms and to customize existing forms to meet our changing needs on the fly.”
Using the Access suite also enables MRHC to eradicate the cost of pre-printed forms for patient care. The organization used to spend a total of $82,900 each year on forms for inpatients and outpatients, including the costs of printing and paying a forms vendor for set up and delivery. Implementing the Access solution has reduced total annual expenditure to $46,410.
“Replacing a paper-driven forms process with the Access PFS solution saves us $36,490 annually,” Olsen said. “The Access system also saved us $24,000 we would have spent on buying new stamp plate machines and eliminated the supply overhead for this equipment. We’ve also eliminated costs associated with changing forms and disposing outdated forms.”
In addition to saving money, Access delivers time savings in the admissions department. Now, patient forms are designed and managed using an intuitive design tool and barcodes are automatically included on them. Once the forms are completed and signed by a patient, a staff member scans them into MRHC’s document imaging system, which uses OCR technology to automatically index the forms to the patient’s record in the HIS.
“Access products have eliminated manual data entry in the admissions department,” Olsen said. “They work with our document imaging system to create a seamless solution that speeds registration, and so increases patient satisfaction.”
In the patient finance area, employees print UB04 and 1500 Claim Forms to send to insurance companies. Previously, they printed duplicates that were scanned into the document imaging system and manually indexed. Now, the Access Image Portal automatically sends a duplicate of each form to the document imaging system where it is auto-indexed, eliminating the printing cost and manual processing time associated with filing hard copies.
“The patient accounts director told me that using the Access system saved half an FTE because of the manual work it eradicates,” Olsen said.
About Access
Access provides electronic forms and workflow automation solutions to hundreds of healthcare organizations worldwide. Access products create time and cost savings facility-wide, and integrate with existing HIS, ERP, clinical and document management systems to deliver maximum return on investment. Ease of use, administration and expansion provide even greater value. Learn more about Access solutions at www.accesseforms.com
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