Memorial Hospital Selects Access Intelligent Forms Suite to Get Barcoded Forms into MEDITECH EHRs

Oct. 12, 2010 - PRLog -- When Memorial Hospital, located in Belleville, Ill., examined new ways to efficiently manage their hybrid patient record while progressing to a full electronic health record (EHR) administrators recognized the need for electronic forms software to complement its MEDITECH systems. After a thorough analysis, the organization chose Access Intelligent Forms Suite (IFS), the world's leading forms automation and management solution.

“Creating efficiencies in the patient registration process is a key objective of our organization and will be a big satisfier for our patients,” said Jennifer Meinkoth, Memorial Hospital’s CIO. “Through use of Access’ IFS, E-signature and Image Portal, we’ll be able to push signed documents directly to our archive system – eliminating the scanning process for our registration staff.”

Memorial Hospital is working towards implementation of MEDITECH’s 6.0 Advanced Clinical/EMR system. As a result of their phased approach, patient registration and clinical departments will continue to deal with some paper documents, and need an efficient way to get paper-based patient forms into the electronic record. Access e-Forms Repository, part of Access IFS, is helping ease the transition by providing print on demand form with barcodes and patient demographics applied.

“Using Access Electronic Forms Repository to print medical record forms with all required patient and form identifiers will allow us to implement scanning of critical documents at the point of care – when they are needed by the care providers,’ Meinkoth said. “For documents that continue to be scanned post-discharge, we can be assured the forms have all required barcodes – improving accuracy and productivity for the batch scanning process.”

By replacing pre-printed paper forms with print on demand e-forms, Memorial Hospital will reduce costs and storage needs in patient registration and on clinical floors, while reducing paper clutter for clinicians and registrars.

“While working in this dual paper/electronic environment, using technology like Access Intelligent Forms Suite to minimize the paper at the point of care will go a long way towards clinician adoption of our electronic record,” Meinkoth said.

Meinkoth’s team will also implement Access Universal Document Portal, which captures output from clinical devices and systems, standardizes it and interfaces it into the EMR. Access UDP will auto-index clinical data in Memorial Hospital’s MEDITECH Scanning and Archiving (SCA) module, eliminating the need for manual indexing by HIM staff members.

“I’m looking forward to use of Access Universal Document Portal to incorporate results from some of our non-MEDITECH systems into MEDITECH’s SCA and EMR,” Meinkoth said. “We have a number of systems that have not been amenable to standard interfaces that we’ll be able to integrate in this way. The end result will be improved accessibility for all clinicians.”

About Memorial Hospital
Serving the community since 1958, Memorial Hospital, a 316-bed independently owned and operated community hospital located just 15-minutes east of downtown St. Louis, Missouri, provides a full range of inpatient and outpatient services. With over 2,200 full and part-time employees and a Medical Staff of over 350 physicians representing 42 specialties, Memorial is the area's sixth largest employer. Memorial is the area's largest provider of surgical services and diagnostic imaging as well as physical therapy/rehab services.

About Access
Access is the world’s leading electronic forms management, automation and workflow provider. Our solutions transform any paper-intensive forms process into a paperless, collaborative workflow. Hundreds of hospitals worldwide are using Access solutions to improve patient care and safety, cut costs and enhance electronic health records (EHR), patient safety and downtime planning initiatives. Learn more at www.accessefm.com

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Access is the world’s leading electronic forms management, automation and workflow provider. Our solutions transform any paper-intensive forms process into a paperless, collaborative workflow.