For years, manual processes have plagued healthcare organizations. Manual healthcare processes are time-consuming, costly, and can leave them vulnerable to security threats. When a hospital is providing care for thousands of patients a year, that adds up to a lot of records to physically store. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) was launched as a way to help healthcare organizations handle their physical patient records. The act requires medical organizations to secure Protected Health Information (PHI), exchange data electronically, and protect patient information.

The Children's Hospital of New Orleans is the only full-service hospital dedicated exclusively to caring for children in the entire state of Louisiana. The hospital receives visits from hundreds of thousands of patients annually, all of which receive a paper chart on their first visit, causing records to rapidly pile up, overwhelming staff. Having to navigate through thousands of physical documents made responding to information a much more tedious and time-consuming task. Under pressure from HIPAA regulations to convert to an Electronic Health Records (EHR) system, the need to convert to an electronic system took top priority and the staff from the Children’s Hospital began to look for a solution.

Medical records staff worked with Digitech Systems reseller, Superior Data Services to build an electronic solution. They chose to implement PaperFlow^™ to automatically route scanned records into PaperVision^® Enterprise, an on-premise document management system, to manage medical records in-house. Ditching their outdated manual processes for their new electronic system has allowed staff to improve productivity, eliminate costly physical storage, and enable HIPAA compliance. Staff is now able to electronically manage terabytes of patient information effortlessly.