Electronic Documentation Optimizes Surgery Referrals

By Ken Congdon

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.