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Reduce Costs With Scanning Services
March 10, 2008
By outsourcing scanner maintenance, Ball Memorial Hospital ensures imaging uptime, while freeing up employees to focus on core hospital responsibilities.
It’s not unusual for a company’s IT department to have responsibilities continually added to it. While the department should be accountable for certain equipment and processes, others just aren’t part of its core competency. Ball Memorial Hospital fell into this trap when it was ordering the supplies and managing the maintenance of its document scanners.
Ball Memorial Hospital is a teaching facility with approximately 350 daily discharges, including inpatient, outpatient, surgical, and emergency patients. Each of these discharges needs to be processed in a timely manner so the patient records are available electronically in the hospital’s Horizon Patient Folder imaging system. The hospital’s Health Information Management (HIM) department is responsible for scanning, processing, and maintaining the more than 1,500 health documents associated with each batch of daily discharges.
The hospital was using two large scanners it originally installed in the mid-1990s to scan its health records. As these scanners aged, they required maintenance on a more frequent basis. At the time, the hospital was responsible for ordering the supplies (e.g. rollers, belts, cleaning kits, etc.) for the scanners. Oftentimes, hospital employees would procrastinate in ordering new scanner supplies, and imaging delays would result as they waited for the supplies to arrive.
The older scanners Ball Memorial was using also took up a lot of space. “Each scanner was the size of half a desk, leaving the operator with only two feet of workspace,” details Cindy Lowe, senior application analyst at Ball Memorial Hospital. While they were becoming difficult to operate and maintain, the hospital
didn’t have any other imaging options at the time, since the scanners it used were the only devices certified to work with the Horizon Patient Folder.
USE SITE VISITS TO EVALUATE SCANNERS
In 2006, Ball Memorial initiated a system upgrade, which gave the hospital the opportunity to investigate additional scanners that had since become compatible with the Horizon Patient Folder. Ball Memorial evaluated a few of these new scanner options, and IT employees even conducted site visits at other healthcare facilities to see these new options in a production environment similar to its own.
Based on these site visits, the hospital decided to replace its old scanners with two BÖWE BELL + HOWELL Spectrum XF 8090 scanners. The scanners were added to the $150,000 contract to upgrade the hospital’s software. Ball Memorial also used the system upgrade as an opportunity to extend its scanner support and maintenance contract with Versitec, a document imaging service specialist.
When Ball Memorial first decided to scan its medical records in the 1990s, it decided to use Versitec to manage the annual service and support of its scanners, rather than managing this task itself. “Versitec coordinated the required maintenance on our scanners, while at the same time they were working with us to get all the appropriate paperwork processed and caught up,” says Lowe. For a quarterly fee per scanner, Versitec handled, and continues to handle, all the preventative maintenance on the scanning devices on a semiannual basis. At the time of the upgrade, Ball Memorial also decided to leverage its relationship with Versitec to include scanning supply management. The hospital selected Versitec’s V-CARE program — a customizable scanner support program that integrates preventative maintenance, scanner service, and regular shipments of scanner supplies and consumables kits into one plan — to fill this need.
NEW SCANNERS, OUTSOURCED SERVICES INCREASE PRODUCTIVITY
Ball Memorial realized many productivity gains as a result of its new Spectrum scanners. The HIM department can now process more records per shift since the new scanners can scan 88 pages per minute. This throughput helps the hospital consistently meet its goal of scanning a patient’s record into the Horizon Patient Folder within 48 hours of discharge.
The new Spectrum scanners also have a smaller footprint than the older scanners, providing HIM employees with added space for the patient’s paper chart and a PC. With the smaller footprint, the hospital was able to rearrange the layout of the department and add an extra cubicle to the work area.
Finally, through its relationship with Versitec, the HIM department doesn’t have to be bothered with a single scanner maintenance task — not even ordering supplies. “We have prescheduled preventative maintenance on our scanners, and Versitec now automatically sends cleaning and consumables kits to us, so we no longer have to order the supplies ourselves,” states Lowe.
The service Versitec provides has helped Ball Memorial Hospital realize improved equipment performance and uptime, which has helped maximize the HIM department’s imaging productivity. Furthermore, since employees no longer have to worry about scanner maintenance, they have more time to focus on their core hospital responsibilities.
Author: Megan Burns
Source: Integrated Solutions
Category: Service Management