A Patient esignature Case Study
San Juan Regional Medical Center
improving eforms workflow and tracking
Introduction
Located in the beautiful San Juan River Valley in northwest New Mexico, San Juan Regional Medical Center is a 194-bed, level III trauma center that includes state-of-theart operating suites and 72 private patient rooms with fresh air balconies.
As a nonprofit, community-owned hospital, San Juan Regional Medical Center serves the Four Corners area of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Utah. The SJRMC network includes an 18-bed rehabilitation hospital, San Juan Health Partners specialty clinics, heart center, outpatient rehabilitation care, outpatient diagnostic services, wound treatment center, AirCare emergency service, a free-standing cancer center, San Juan Regional Spine Center, and San Juan Regional Heart Center.
PATIENT ESIGNATURE Case Study Highlights
- Replaced outdated eForms system with the latest paperless technology from Access.
- Added electronic patient signatures to further streamline the admissions process in registration and the ED
- Integrated output from 30+ clinical systems and medical devices into the EHR without user intervention or generating paper
- Helped ISO compliance by improving forms workflow and tracking
Quick Facts
Location: Farmington, New Mexico
Integration: Cerner
Focus: Paperless eForms and clinical device and system integration
Departments: Registration, Emergency Department, ICU
Access solutions: Intelligent eForms, Electronic Signatures, Enterprise Integration, Process Automation
Transforming Materials Management Processes and Improving Document Tracking
When Robert Mims joined MMH as director of materials management, the hospital’s IT director told him that the hospital had purchased Access’s web-based forms solution, but had yet to deploy it. He asked Mims if he could find some paper-based forms processes that could be replaced by fast, electronic workflows. It didn’t take Mims long to find multiple use cases, and he prioritized purchase order (PO) supply ordering for his department.
MMH has a process built in to its IT system for ordering repetitive supplies, but requesting one-offs was a complex, slow, paper-centric process that Mims said, “required a lot of emailing back and forth and multiple follow-ups for each item.” So he created an electronic form that enables his colleagues to quickly request products, conference seats, travel and more online, with a one-time request.
Another related process involved paying for items with a company credit card. Previously, Mims took time at the end of each month to see who had used the card and reconcile the purchases.
“There was no real approval process before we started using the Access system, but now we’ve fixed the process and there’s a lot less legwork at the end of the month,” Mims said. “Everyone loves the new way of doing it.”
Next, Mims turned his attention to MMH’s capital equipment request process, which he said “was very cumbersome.” Each request above a certain amount went to the board members, who signed for approval if they deemed the expense necessary. The trouble was that if one of the approvers was out of the office, they could sometimes not see the form on their desk.
This meant it didn’t get the final approval signatures, and the designated money wasn’t spent. Once the signatures had been collected, the purchase was often completed the following month or quarter, impacting the budget and cash flow. The Access system has changed all this for the better.
“Instead of a capital request form being forgotten on a desk, we get emails saying we need to provide our signatures,” Mims said. “As the Access system provides forms via the web, we can issue our approval from home or anywhere else. This means we’re spending money in the same quarter it’s designated for purchases, which helps keep our cash flow regular.”
Improving Document Tracking
Before moving to e-forms, it was difficult to know who had a certain form and what action was still required.
In addition to planning deployment of electronic forms in clinical and administrative areas, Access is working closely with the hospital’s IT team to create paper-free, forms-driven processes that meet strict ISO-compliance standards.
“Unlike our previous eForms vendor, Access always works hard to understand our goals and helps us achieve them. They’ve always come to us and said, ‘What can we do to make it better?’ It’s more of a partnership than a vendor-client relationship.”
Robert Mims
San Juan Regional Medical Center
Conclusion
Integrating Clinical Device Output into the EHR
San Juan Regional is a long-time user of Access’s clinical data bridge, which enables the facility to send output from more than 30 clinical systems and devices—including endoscopy, anesthesia and post procedure reports, EKG traces and inpatient and outpatient notes—directly into EHRs. No manual effort or data entry is required.
Previously, San Juan Regional struggled to get output from all its medical devices and systems, which are spread throughout various floors and departments, into the EHR. There were only two possible solutions: 1) printing output, scanning and indexing it, or 2) paying for a costly interface for each feed into the EHR. That is until Access presented a third way. The company’s enterprise integration solution captures output from San Juan Regional’s different systems and devices, standardizes it and integrates it directly into the correct patient’s electronic chart. There’s no paper, no delays, no manual effort and no errors.
“Access’s clinical data bridge has been the single most impactful solution in our organization, and we have many, many, many systems that are feeding into our EHR today,” Rawlings said. “It has streamlined and automated our workflow, and I can’t even tell you how many hours we’ve saved with that process.”
By facilitating a significant reduction in paper use, the Access solution also is reducing San Juan Regional’s carbon footprint and positively impacting the bottom line.
“In the ICU, they typically generate about 600 pages per stay,” Rawlings said. “With the Access system, we’re no longer having to print that off and scan it every time, so we’re eliminating ream after ream of paper in the ICU alone. We average 48,000 visits in our ED every year, so there’s a big paper savings there, too.”