How Xerox Helped a Community-Focused Los Angeles Hospital Digitize Its Records and Improve Patient Care

White Memorial Medical Center is a not-for-profit, teaching hospital that has served communities in and around downtown Los Angeles for more than 100 years. Today, it’s staffed by 400 physicians and 1,800 employees, and it serves more than 165,000 patients per year with a full range of inpatient, outpatient, emergency and diagnostic services.

That means a lot of documentation. White Memorial needs to keep its patient records both secure and readily accessible, so that they’re available on a highly controlled basis to medical staff, insurance companies, attorneys, billing analysts and auditors. The hospital needs to contain costs and qualify for future government electronic health records (EHR) incentives. And it needs to do all of that while providing excellent patient care.

But managing administrative records on paper, as White Memorial had been doing for decades, was slow and unreliable, resulting in inefficiencies throughout the hospital.

“To better serve our community, we needed to move from cumbersome, paper-based systems with high costs to a more efficient electronic system,” says Mara Bryant, associate vice president at White Memorial.

That’s why White Memorial chose the Xerox^® DocuShare^® content management platform. With help from Xerox, the hospital set up a customized and integrated system that provides a single view of a patient’s medical records along with business and administrative information.

It’s a solution that handles documents from inpatient admissions, patient financial services, the pharmacy order processing system and other departments and processes, all in one place. It’s secure — with detailed tracking and reporting on who accesses patient information and when — to satisfy government regulations. And it’s easy for hospital staff to use, letting medical and administrative staff find and retrieve information using a range of search criteria, like medical record number, date of birth, admission date and more.

To help set up White Memorial’s new digital system, the Xerox team configured Xerox^® multifunction printers (MFPs) to scan thousands of pages of hard-copy records in an efficient and consistent way, capturing needed data, delivering the electronic documents to the right DocuShare folders and starting process workflows.

The shift from paper documents to an electronic content management system delivered immediate benefits for White Memorial. Information is secure, easy to find and retrieve, and can be shared with authorized people within and outside the hospital. Integrating the paper-based and administrative records with the central patient medical records system allows physicians to review a patient’s history immediately, as medical decisions need to be made. Records can be accessed across departments, and changes made to a document or digital image are tracked and captured as new versions, providing a complete history of the changes for regulatory compliance.

Users in admitting, patient financial services, the emergency department, nurses’ stations, pharmacy, and offsite storage scan documents into automated processes such as billing, admitting, and pharmacy medication order processing. Using DocuShare’s advanced workflow features, for example, pharmacy order processing is now automated, with scanned physician orders placed into an electronic queue, where they are reviewed by pharmacists, approved, filled, and sent to the nurse’s station of the requesting unit.

Automating the pharmacy order processing system enabled management to restructure the pharmacy department from one centralized unit to a decentralized model, which provides better staff and resource usage. Pharmacy management now has real-time insight into order volumes and status, which enables them to balance workloads by adjusting shifts and staff deployment.

It’s a more efficient system that makes records easier to keep, organize and access for doctors, nurses, staff, and administrators across White Memorial. And that translates to more time and resources to devote to better patient care.

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