Case Study: Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital: Document Imaging To Create The Electronic Medical Record

According to a Price Waterhouse Coopers study, 500 billion paper documents are created annually in healthcare and these paper documents account for 25% of every healthcare dollar spent. This equates to a total cost of $125 billion per year. Like many other healthcare organizations, Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital (180,000 patient visits/yr), located in Grass Valley, CA, faced the challenge of mounting costs associated with paper documents, their storage and accessibility.

SNMH's vision is best explained by Mark Freitas, Business Office and IT Director; "Our viewpoint was that a complete EMR solution for the hospital was necessary and we had been building towards that. There were very few hospitals that had an EMR solution. We found about 5-10% had implemented a solution and a number of hospitals that had abandoned that strategy because the return on investment was not there. We did not want to go down the same road. We started looking at how we could develop a sound strategy and look for early returns."

Creating the Paperless Environment
The first step in achieving their objective was to find a vendor who offered healthcare providers the ability to move towards a paperless work environment at their own pace, using an integrated family of document management and imaging solutions. Omtool, Ltd. was the partner SNMH selected to deliver these solutions, in a phased approach, to address their unique challenges. SNMH's first priority was to reduce costs associated with the patient registration process — with particular focus on preprinted forms and process inefficiencies associated with the scanning, routing and storage of patient documentation. This included insurance cards, condition of admission (consent), notice of privacy practices, physician order, payer eligibility, authorization documents and living wills.