This may be an obvious statement, but I’m going to say it anyway — paper breeds inaccuracy and inefficiency. Scripps Mercy Surgery Pavilion, a freestanding outpatient surgery center located in San Diego, can attest to this fact.
For many physicians in Southern California, Scripps Mercy Surgery Pavilion is their venue of choice to perform outpatient procedures. Booking surgical facilities at Scripps requires proper referral and scheduling documentation, and historically, this process was paper-based. In other words, physician offices would fill out, by hand, one of the surgery center’s preprinted scheduling forms. These forms contained all of the information required to schedule an outpatient procedure (e.g., patient demographics, insurance information, surgical procedure codes, etc.). The doctors’ offices would then fax these handwritten forms to the Pavilion where in-house schedulers would manually enter the information from the fax into the surgery center’s scheduling and EHR system, ASC Software by SourceMedical.
Using HIPAA-compliant electronic document exchange, Scripps Mercy Surgery Pavilion improved referral accuracy and staff productivity.
![]()
This may be an obvious statement, but I’m going to say it anyway — paper breeds inaccuracy and inefficiency. Scripps Mercy Surgery Pavilion, a freestanding outpatient surgery center located in San Diego, can attest to this fact.
For many physicians in Southern California, Scripps Mercy Surgery Pavilion is their venue of choice to perform outpatient procedures. Booking surgical facilities at Scripps requires proper referral and scheduling documentation, and historically, this process was paper-based. In other words, physician offices would fill out, by hand, one of the surgery center’s preprinted scheduling forms. These forms contained all of the information required to schedule an outpatient procedure (e.g., patient demographics, insurance information, surgical procedure codes, etc.). The doctors’ offices would then fax these handwritten forms to the Pavilion where in-house schedulers would manually enter the information from the fax into the surgery center’s scheduling and EHR system, ASC Software by SourceMedical.
Hard-To-Read Faxes Create Data Inconsistencies
Needless to say, these faxed, handwritten documents were often difficult to read, and sometimes key pieces of information were missing. In these instances, Scripps schedulers would call the physicians offices in an effort to track down the missing information or verify illegible content. However, schedulers often found that physicians or office administrators weren’t always readily available to take their calls or answer their questions. When this occurred, schedulers were forced to leave messages and wait for a reply, which often took hours or days to arrive, if at all.
Because of this process, Scripps schedulers spent an inordinate amount of time on the phone. Furthermore, in time-sensitive cases, schedulers were sometimes forced to key in sketchy information from a faxed form without verbal confirmation of the hard-to-read content from the referring doctor’s office. This practice sometimes resulted in data inaccuracies.
![]()
Some handwriting can be difficult enough to read on its own,” says Snapper Humphries, scheduler at Scripps Mercy Surgery Pavilion. “Combine that with a blurry fax, and you have some real legibility issues. As a result, there were instances where our schedulers made data entry mistakes. Because the forms were hard to read, patient names were sometimes misspelled, or procedures were inaccurately recorded in our scheduling system.”
Another problem with paper faxes was that they were easy to lose. “There were a few occasions where patients would show up for surgery on a particular day, and we had no record of it in our scheduling system either because we never received the fax or misplaced it before the data was entered into ASC,” says Humphries. “Also, we would sometimes receive pages of faxed referrals overnight only to come in the next morning to realize the fax machine ran out of ink. We couldn’t read these faxes, so we would have to call all of the physicians offices and request that they resend the information.”
Selecting A HIPAA-Compliant Electronic Documentation Solution
Prompted by these inefficiencies and new electronic data exchange requirements enforced by HIPAA 5010, Scripps Mercy Surgery Pavilion started to evaluate electronic documentation solutions that would allow the provider to automate and streamline referrals and other clinical communications. Ultimately, Scripps selected ZirMed Clinical Link as its technology partner. With Clinical Link, doctors’ offices can now complete an electronic version of the referral form online as opposed to handwriting and faxing the document to the Pavilion.
Scripps installed Clinical Link in 2012 and provided its physicians office partners with access to its ZirMed portal to complete referrals online. Currently, the Pavilion doesn’t require referring physicians to use Clinical Link, but more than half of the 90 physicians who use the surgery center already do because of the added convenience and efficiency the technology provides. Humphries expects all of the surgeons to be using Clinical Link within the next year or two.
Electronic Referrals Improve Data Accuracy, Staff Productivity
Since launching Clinical Link, Scripps Mercy Surgery Pavilion has seen a dramatic reduction in faxed referrals, and staff productivity and data accuracy have improved as a result. Scripps schedulers don’t have to manually enter data from hard-to-read fax documents for referrals submitted via Clinical Link, which has reduced booking errors that contribute to surgical waste and patient dissatisfaction.
Furthermore, Scripps schedulers find themselves placing fewer and fewer phone calls to physicians offices since Clinical Link has been implemented. “If information is missing from an electronic referral submitted via Clinical Link, we simply send the referring physician’s office an online message via the Clinical Link portal and go about our business,” says Humphries. “This capability has helped increase our productivity because we don’t have to call doctors’ offices over and over again.”
![]()
According to Humphries, the physicians offices also rave about the new electronic documentation platform because of its autopopulate feature. When a repeat patient is entered into the system, Clinical Link remembers key information about the patient and automatically completes several of the demographic fields. Physicians’ offices don’t have to continually type in the same information, which comes in handy for patients with pain management issues who can visit the surgery center as frequently as once a month.
Another convenient feature of Clinical Link is the fact that it allows schedulers to immediately generate PDFs of referrals or other clinical documents and drag and drop these files into the EHR system. Previously, schedulers had to scan copies of faxed referrals and manually upload these document images into the patient’s electronic record. The new method is just another small way Clinical Link helps save time for schedulers.
Finally, Scripps’ move to Clinical Link has contributed to a sizeable reduction in paper-related costs at the Pavilion. “We’re saving money on paper, ink, and anything related to the wear and tear of fax machines, printers, and copy machines,” says Humphries. “We’re also saving money on shredding services, because we’re not generating as much paper containing PHI that needs to be destroyed to ensure patient privacy.”
This may be an obvious statement, but I’m going to say it anyway — paper breeds inaccuracy and inefficiency. Scripps Mercy Surgery Pavilion, a freestanding outpatient surgery center located in San Diego, can attest to this fact.
Some handwriting can be difficult enough to read on its own,” says Snapper Humphries, scheduler at Scripps Mercy Surgery Pavilion. “Combine that with a blurry fax, and you have some real legibility issues. As a result, there were instances where our schedulers made data entry mistakes. Because the forms were hard to read, patient names were sometimes misspelled, or procedures were inaccurately recorded in our scheduling system.”
According to Humphries, the physicians offices also rave about the new electronic documentation platform because of its autopopulate feature. When a repeat patient is entered into the system, Clinical Link remembers key information about the patient and automatically completes several of the demographic fields. Physicians’ offices don’t have to continually type in the same information, which comes in handy for patients with pain management issues who can visit the surgery center as frequently as once a month.
