Snapsflow

Healthcare Solutions

Automation of Distribution of ER Discharge Summaries

As one of the nation's leading operators of general acute care hospitals, this customer has over 100 hospitals in 30 states.  When patients are seen in the emergency room (ER), it is important that their primary care physician is informed of the outcome of the encounter.  With over 119 million emergency visits annually this becomes a difficult, time consuming task.

Historically, discharge summary report were generated by the ER clinical system and printed at each facility.  Once printed, they were given to a clerk to scan and fax manually to the primary care physician. The delay in communicating the discharge summaries could have been up to three days.  The average organization used about .25 of one full-time-equivalent (FTE) to manage this faxing process.  This equated to approximately 25 FTEs system wide required to perform this manual task.  The human cost of this task alone was just under 1 million dollars each year.

SOLUTION

Snapsflow provides an automated approach to distribution of discharge summaries to physicians from the clinical documentation system.  The ER system is able to produce and export discharge summary reports in a PDF format.  These reports include patient identifiers as well as physician identifiers.  Using the remote file connector, Snapsflow automatically monitors the system for ER Discharge summary reports.  When a report is available, it is picked up by the system, the hospital name is assigned to the report and it is transferred to the Snapsflow Engine for processing.  The Snapsflow Engine picks up the discharge summary report and parses the filename to obtain the:

• Hospital name
• Physician ID
• Patient ID

SNAPS then looks up the physician’s preference for faxing or e-mail. While the physician’s preferencing system can handle multiple document types, in this case, they are distributing only discharge summary reports at this time. Physicians may specify up to four fax numbers and one email address. For each day of the week, a primary and secondary fax number or email address can be specified. The report is automatically sent to the physician’s preferred location.  It can be routed to a fax machine and printed or can be sent to the physicians desktop. The physician contact information and the deletion or addition of physicians can be easily accomplished by the system administrator at the facility.

If for any reason, the physician cannot be identified, the reports are sent to an exception queue where they can be manually deciphered and sent.  The system is currently sending over 1.500 faxes each day and plan to grow to 3,000 per day in the next six months. The system will monitor and log all outbound fax documents.

The Solution also offers reporting using Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services with the currently available standard reports.

Benefit/ROI
Our client recognized a return on their investment in just a few months. The major pay-back is in the labor costs associated with manual faxing, but another major benefit is increased physician satisfaction.

Collaboration Improves Lives

This simple axiom drives everything we do. It shapes how we approach problems, execute solutions and measure results. It’s not enough to be a real-time organization; you need to facilitate real-time collaboration. We do this using the Adaptive Exchange Methodology.

The Adaptive Exchange Methodology uses a stack of technologies called the Snapsflow Framework. Each technology is focused on overcoming specific challenges in achieving Real Time Collaboration. The Holon Framework was built, from the ground up, to be configured into combinations that lower the technical and human hurdles to collaboration while optimizing strategic agility and operational efficiency.