Hospitals Manage Patient Data Using SolComHealth App

"The health-care industry is just now realizing what technology can do for them," said Steve Thompson, director of sales and marketing at SolCom, which has been developing electronic medical-records systems for nearly eight years. "Now they can look at the revenue cycle, labor costs and customer service the same way any other business does."

Even large systems integrators and vendors are seeing the change. In April, two of the largest IT consultancies in the United States bought dedicated health-care practices. Within one week of each other, Accenture paid $175 million for the U.S. health-care enterprise of Capgemini and IBM bought Healthlink, touted as the largest U.S. consulting firm focused on the health-care market, for an undisclosed sum.

The health-care industry has long been famous as an IT laggard. While hospitals and other providers have been using computerized billing systems for years, the industry has not yet gotten its act together when it comes to converting patient records from paper into electronic format.

It wasn't for lack of interest. Back in 1995, the Medical Records Institute predicted that the health-care market would spend upwards of $5 trillion on patient-records systems over a five-year period.

Many professional medical organizations have lauded the cost-effective and life-saving benefits of having patients' medical information accessible on a computer. Yet by 2002, only 14 percent of U.S. hospitals had implemented an electronic system for maintaining such records, according to the U.S. Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, a unit of the Department of Health and Human Services.

One factor that has slowed adoption of electronic records management is the need for applications that are easy to use and able to handle the variety of tasks and documents involved. SolCom focuses on these objectives with its SolComHealth electronic document management application.

Today more than 22 hospitals around the country use SolComHealth to blend information such as transcripts, EKGs, lab results, radiology data, emergency room observations and billing codes, Thompson said.

The first step in bringing business-process management to the medical realm: Converting the reams of paper into electronic format. SolCom uses Kofax's Ascent Capture software for scanning, processing and indexing high volumes of paper generated during each patient visit.

"The nurses still have a chart on the floor. Physicians orders are still being faxed in. So our first step is getting all of that paper read in," Thompson said. "This warms everyone up to using the system."

But as important as it is to meld the disparate information, the real value comes when SolCom overlays best practices. "We bring business-process management to health care. Once it's paperless, the efficiencies are incredible," Thompson said.

Following the initial steps, SolCom works with each of its customers to fine-tune the underlying business processes. At one of SolCom's customers, Sioux Valley Hospital and Health System in Sioux Falls, managers can determine each day which charts to process first, whether by dollar amount, service performed or date of discharge. That choice can translate into higher returns for the health-care provider.

What's more, administrative personnel don't even receive a chart to process until it's complete. "And the faster we turn these records around, the shorter amount of time they're in accounts receivable," said Mary Nelson, Sioux Valley Hospital's electronic health record project manager.

The electronic solution has meant other significant financial gains for the hospital. Last year the health system processed 120,000 outpatient records, up from 81,000 when the project began in April 2002, and accounts receivable dropped from 61 days out to 50, Nelson said.

"A lot of that has to do with the workflow SolCom built for us—getting transcribed reports, pathology and lab results into our charts, getting those charts to our physicians, and allowing us to process the charts less than two days after the patient is discharged," she said. "Before, someone was constantly sorting through information. Now the information is indexed, it goes where it needs to go, and the computer does the work for us."