It’s no secret that healthcare reform regulations have created many challenges for medical practices and other healthcare organizations. It has increased everything from the volume of documents to the number of employees required to handle the daily workload. This has left many organizations floundering. Practices often face the burden of higher employment costs while also trying to handle workflow needs, standardize their processes and operate efficiently. Fortunately, there is a solution to the problem — automated indexing.

Let’s take a look at how one children’s’ medical home used automated indexing to overcome all of these challenges.
 
Manual Indexing and an Overburdened Staff
 
Based in Oldsmar, Florida, the Pediatric Health Care Alliance (PHCA) is the largest pediatric group on the west coast of Florida. PHCA’s 50 board-certified pediatricians and pediatric nurse practitioners, 12 neighborhood locations and central office building serve a population of over 4 million.
 
With these 50 providers treating patients on a daily basis, PHCA’s volume of documents grew so much that it required multiple staff members at each of the 13 locations to perform the manual, but necessary, portion of the indexing process.
 
On average, PHCA creates 40,000 documents a month. Not only was each document manually scanned, they also required the attention of numerous employees. It was a system that was both inefficient and prone to errors, all due to a lack of standardization.
 
For PHCA, it was time for a scanning solution that would allow it to handle this workload efficiently and relieve the heavy burden on their staff resources.
 
From Multiple Employees in Various Locations to One Part-Time Indexer
 
It was at an Electronic Medical Record User Group that PHCA’s leadership first learned about InDxLogic’s AutoIndexing Enterprise Document Management System.
 
PHCA decided to make the commitment to improve efficiency and decrease the indexing burden carried by its staff. The company moved forward with InDxLogic’s auto-indexing solution to handle the estimated 40,000 documents they scan each month.
 
Before long, PHCA experienced some big benefits.
 
By replacing their manual process with InDxLogic’s automated indexing, PHCA was able to reduce the number of staff handling its document workload to just one indexer.
 
Now, this employee only uses two to three hours each day to index PHCA’s medical documents. That’s because PHCA now only has to “touch” between 10 and 20 percent of their documents. With InDxLogic, PHCA’s staff no longer has to interact with all 40,000 documents, which provided a dramatic time-savings.
 
Even better, the improved efficiency came with some unexpected benefits. With staff at its multiple locations freed from the task of manual indexing, PHCA has also been able to re-allocate staff members to higher value-added activities such as patient care, better utilizing their staffing dollars.
 
In addition, PHCA has seen the dramatic benefits of standardization achieved through auto-indexing, eliminating the errors the system was prone to previously.
 
An Added Benefit of Peace of Mind
 
But, the benefits of their switch to automated indexing didn’t end there.
 
PCHA also found that InDxLogic’s Secure Home, something missing from the provider’s previous indexing solution, brought peace of mind. With their previous solution, there was no way to know whether or not a document was scanned. If it wasn’t in the patient’s chart, their staff and providers never knew what happened to it.
 
InDxLogic’s Secure Home has made that problem a thing of the past, and provided PHCA a means to easily find missing documents and determine whether or not they were properly scanned.
 
Now, PHCA staff members can check the database to see if a document was scanned correctly and review every detail with ease.
 
Rising to the Challenges of Today’s Healthcare Organizations
 
PHCA’s transition from manual indexing to full auto-indexing has paid off in both efficiency and staffing management for its multiple locations. Even with 50 providers in the practice, PHCA now requires only one part-time indexer to handle the large number of documents that must be processed. As an added benefit, automated indexing has allowed PHCA to better utilize its staff resources, standardize processes, and easily locate vital documents.
 
With all of these benefits, PHCA is able to not just face the challenges of today’s healthcare organizations, but rise above to create long-term success for both the organization its patients.
 
How is your practice rising to the challenges of today’s regulatory environment and the massive burden it has created?