- A digital overhaul can save medical providers 20 to 30% in office expenses.
For more than 15 years a Fairfield County, Connecticut medical practice of eight Physicians and three locations used virtually no digital communications to streamline operations in their offices. It lacked e-mail, no intranet, and no central repository for patient and business records.
In fact, patient appointments among the offices were coordinated by fax and patient records were hand carried. Staff wasted time hunting for records on their approximately 8,000 patients. Using transcription services, dictating records into Microsoft Word and errors from unreadable handwriting drove up costs. The offices use Outlook, but the e-mail files were scattered around various user workstations. Oversight and email retention was difficult to achieve if nonexistent. Occasional virus infections are a problem.
The practice wanted to cut costs, improve efficiencies, and improve patient care by migrating to electronic record keeping including scheduling, billing and reports. Due to regulatory changes in eHealth the office also wanted to be ready for the new government incentives and regulations.
The Solution
To enable the offices to communicate, Computer Systems Support & Design recommended installing the Microsoft Small Business Server system in a wide-area-network as the central repository for all practice generated documents and to provide centralized authentication of users and backup.
Cisco wireless access points in each office provide wireless connectivity and a Cisco Security Appliance at the edge provides site-to-site VPN and protects the internal network from mal-ware and viruses.
This first implementation phase lasts several months and is used extensively for testing and customization. Once the networks perform satisfactorily, phase two of the project is ready to get underway. This phase calls for implementing EMR Software (such as GloStream) to manage medical records and a scheduling, billing and reporting system on all laptops and workstations. Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition lets doctors dictate exam notes that instantly become part of the patient's chart and speeds up billing.
The practice no longer needs to send snail -mail letters to referring Physicians, instead the system faxes those automatically once the exam is complete. Doctors can send prescriptions electronically to the pharmacy saving time and potentially eliminating errors caused by messy handwriting. The system also flags prescriptions that might react badly with other medications the patient is taking.
Backups of the servers are scheduled every 15 minutes and are capable of being virtualized in case of a catastrophic loss of the server. Every 24 hours all data is replicated to offsite servers widely disbursed in data centers on the East and West Coasts.
The Payoff
With the new system in place, staff members can communicate and view patients records free of all the hassles of physical paperwork. Coordination between Doctors, Technicians and Nurses is much more streamlined and saves the practice significant amount of money in the short-term. In the long-term the system automatically populates Electronic Medical Records and Practice Management Systems. Managers can produce business reports that exam trends in billing and patient care.
The Practice benefits from improved record keeping, efficiency, and patient care.
Don’t delay, call us now. We are excited to respond to your RFP.
Good Networking,
Johannes Banck, SBSC, CIO & Owner
Computer Systems Support & Design, LLC
203.349.8047 Ext 211
