Digital Medicine

While the pros and cons of SCHIP dominate the news and the blogosphere, a quiet little press release snuck onto the web this morning offering news of advances in the field of electronic medical records (EMRs).

CNNMoney reprints the original Siemens press release:

Siemens Medical Solutions is fulfilling the demand for a workflow-oriented, patient-centric approach to healthcare with its Enterprise Document Management (EDM) and Soarian(R) Healthcare Information Management (HIM) solutions, which are helping healthcare institutions enhance patient care, improve patient safety initiatives, and reduce healthcare costs.

Why would this drive the costs of health care down?

Accessible from any location, EDM and Soarian HIM coordinate processes within and between departments, as well as tasks between users. With their Web-based intuitive user interfaces, the solutions host concurrent and multi- user access, helping to eliminate multiple trips by clinicians and patient financial services staff to the HIM department to access patient data. When patient charts are virtual, costs and time associated with chart storage and retrieval are reduced. Many EDM and Soarian HIM customers are seeing positive outcomes as a result of use at their facilities.

So....

Transparent and portable medical information, eh? Good idea, sounds familiar. According to the release the implementation of these digital sstems has driven down costs while improving efficiency and accessibility. Photocopying costs are a good example. The cost of making copies of medical records was reduced by $100,000 annually for CaroMont Health of North Carolina. and $45,000 for the Mountain States Health Alliance after the implementation of HIM solutions.

The release presents some specific examples on a case by case basis:

CaroMont Health has reduced the number of record requests by 30 percent, its record analysis by 50 percent, its medical records delinquency rate by 84 percent, unbilled accounts receivables by 50 percent and photocopying costs by $100,000 annually.

You can rest assured that we will be returning to this story when there is more to report.


SOURCE: "
Siemens Soarian Health Information Management is Widely Adopted by Leading Healthcare Institutions in 2007: Leading Healthcare Institutions Embrace Technology That Enables Free Flow of Patient Documentation Throughout the Enterprise
" 10/08/07
Image by George Williams