Power PDF Helps Carrus Hospital Advance Strategic Initiatives
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
Carrus reallocates resources, reduces paper, and saves time in managing policies and procedures.
Hospitals depend on reams of policies and procedures to ensure the delivery of proper care to their patients, as well as deliver compliance guidelines and human resources information to their staff. The balance between efficiency and documentation is a precarious one as hospitals face greater pressure to reduce waste, increase efficiencies, and adopt electronic monitoring and information solutions.
Nuance Communications, Inc. has announced Carrus Hospital, a specialty hospital in Sherman, TX, has added a Power PDF function to the Nuance healthcare solutions it already uses to improve its clinical documentation throughout the organization. Specifically, Carrus deployed Nuance Power PDF software to manage nursing and general procedures to drive efficiencies, allowing employees to be more productive and the organization to tackle additional initiatives.
The search for a new solution was the handiwork of current Director of IT at Carrus Hospital, Gary Glenn, who realized users struggled with the legacy PDF software which was inaccessible for those who were not extremely tech-savvy. He immediately began looking for something more user-friendly so everyone from C-level executives and the Chief Nursing Officer (CNO) to administrative assistants could add, remove, and edit PDF documents.
With Power PDF, the 40-bed Carrus Hospital saved $1,800 over the past three years and was able to redirect those funds into a HIPPA-complaint messaging app and secure patient records; saw dramatic paper reduction hospital-wide; dramatically decreased the time to work with PDFs; and created the ability for CEO and CNO to work easily within PDFs. The new messaging initiative directly enhanced patient care by allowing nurses, physicians, therapists, and other ancillary services to quickly and securely communicate patient-related information to ensure all parties are aware of each patient’s needs
The challenge Carrus Hospital faced was the need to manage a host of handbooks detailing policies and procedures for everything from patient care to nursing procedures and general staff guidelines, and it needed to replace an existing solution that was not user friendly, all while minimizing expenditures and shrinking the learning curve.
“Most PDF suites have fairly similar capabilities, so we sought to find software that was as user-friendly as possible to minimize the learning curve,” Glenn. “We are not a large hospital so cost is another critical factor.”
Nuance Power PDF software allows users to create, convert and assemble industry-standard PDF files with streamlined document processes that have contributed to the hospital reducing printing, consuming less paper and toner.