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"Administrative tasks can be burdensome to healthcare organizations andcan sometimes impede upon delivery of care," said Janet Dillione, president,Health Services, the Healthcare IT Division of Siemens Medical Solutions. "Oursolutions are designed with a strong workflow orientation and allow forimmediate access to crucial patient data throughout the enterprise."
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Accessible from any location, EDM and Soarian HIM coordinate processeswithin and between departments, as well as tasks between users. With theirWeb-based intuitive user interfaces, the solutions host concurrent and multi-user access, helping to eliminate multiple trips by clinicians and patientfinancial services staff to the HIM department to access patient data. Whenpatient charts are virtual, costs and time associated with chart storage andretrieval are reduced. Many EDM and Soarian HIM customers are seeing positiveoutcomes as a result of use at their facilities.
Mountain States Health Alliance (MSHA), serving patients in 28 counties inTennessee, Virginia, Kentucky and North Carolina, was formed in 1998 andcurrently serves as the largest regional health care system. The systemcomprises 13 hospitals with more than 1,400 beds, 90 physician practices, 13urgent and outpatient care sites and 56 affiliated hospitals and nursinghomes. Due to its sheer size, MSHA needed to find a way to improve the lengthof time it took to gain access to important data contained within theirpatient's medical records and wanted to cut down on the space needed to filemedical records. The system completed its full EDM and Soarian HIMimplementations in June of 2006. MSHA has seen significant reductions inrecord delinquency rates at many of its facilities and has seen a drop incosts, such as storage costs. Additionally, photocopying costs were reduced bymore than $45,000 between fiscal year 2006 and fiscal year 2007. MSHA also sawan 89 percent reduction in the number of chart pulls between June 2006 andApril 2007.
CaroMont Health, an independent, not-for-profit healthcare system anchoredby Gaston Memorial Hospital and comprised of seven affiliate companiesincluding a network of 24 primary and specialty physician offices, currentlydelivers state of the art healthcare to the southwest Piedmont area of NorthCarolina. CaroMont Health was using paper-based records which slowed physicianreviews, treatment coding, quality reviews and billing, and sometimes causeddelays in overall patient care. The organization deployed Soarian HIM whichhas helped improve patient care by providing medical staff with broad andimmediate access to patient data. In addition, CaroMont Health has reduced thenumber of record requests by 30 percent, its record analysis by 50 percent,its medical records delinquency rate by 84 percent, unbilled accountsreceivables by 50 percent and photocopying costs by $100,000 annually.
PinnacleHealth System, located in Harrisburg, Pa., is a leading healthcaresystem serving several counties in Central Pennsylvania. The system iscomprised of more than 60 facilities,