The Client
The Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System (VAPAHCS) is one of the largest and most complex Veteran Affairs facilities in the nation, providing high quality health care to a large service area for more than 540,000 veterans.
With three inpatient divisions, a main campus in Palo Alto, California, and additional campuses and facilities throughout Northern California, the VAPAHCS has 1,002 operating beds, including nursing homes and homeless domiciliary.
The complex health care system is also home to a variety of special regional treatment centers such as a spinal cord injury center, comprehensive rehabilitation center, traumatic brain injury center, geriatric research, educational and clinical center, homeless veterans rehabilitation program, the National Center for PTSD and the Western Blind Rehabilitation Center.
The VAPAHCS is affiliated with the Stanford School of Medicine. Approximately 1,800 students of various disciplines receive training each year through its affiliations with Stanford and numerous other colleges and universities. The strong, cooperative affiliation with Stanford has helped make the VAPAHCS a leader in research. Delete this entire paragraph.
The Situation
- Decentralized record file rooms, voluminous loose filing and “shadow” charts created cumbersome paperwork processes
- Increasing HIM department requirements and staff turnover added to the cost of managing paper charts
- Medical records clerks were spending too much time creating and copying patient documents, compiling and filing patient charts, and making them available throughout the Health Care System, to the hospital, clinics, physician offices and other requesters
The Challenge
- Improve HIM service performance
- Reduce file room costs
- Eliminate “shadow” files
- Reduce or maintain FTE levels and personnel costs associated with medical records and the file room
- Integrate scanned records into VISTA, the VA's computerized patient record (CPR), to enable access to chart information during all patient care events regardless of time or location
The Solution
The VAPAHCS decided to outsource with HealthSERVE Records Management to capture and store patient information, address the records management and file room issues, and avoid the costs and implementation time associated with other commercial EPR systems.
HealthSERVE Records Management met these challenges by:
- Implementing a comprehensive centralized Record Management service, including document storage, delivery, inventory, tracking and retirement of the paper record
- Creating a state–of–the–art web–based Electronic Data Management System (EDMS), including ongoing support and maintenance, ensuring multiple real–time access to the patient's medical record
- Interfacing with VISTA clinical and demographic packages, including Text Integration Utility (TIU), to electronically capture information as text output and add the information to the HealthSERVE Records Management web repository
- Completing a back file conversion, integrating with the VAPAHCS scheduling system to automatically ensure availability of patient records for each healthcare system encounter
- Eliminating missing and “shadow” files
- Improving release of information and coding services
Following clinical visit or inpatient discharge, documents are collected and picked up by HealthSERVE Records Management to be scanned, indexed and electronically stored for secure retrieval by authorized users.
The Results
VAPAHCS chose HealthSERVE Records Management to capture health information while they were internally developing VISTA. This early adoption of capture and repository services allowed them to have online access of up to 15 years of patient history.
HealthSERVE Records Management continues to capture all loose paper documents daily and store them in an independent repository, which ensures that VAPAHCS has access to patient health information in the event that their own system experiences downtime. Through the implementation of the HealthSERVE Records Management solution, the costs associated with managing a massive amount of information stored on paper continue to be significantly reduced.