He turned to HST and its HSTpathways ASC clinical and financial software, which links the IT systems in the two facilities, letting Mr. Ashby manage both using a single software program.
“I’m able to connect to both systems so that wherever I am, I can see what’s going on,” he says. “I can sit in the office of our old facility and I can bring up and look at the schedule at our new facility from one location. That’s been really beneficial.”
The system lets staff at the facilities receive and enter payments for either facility. Staff members can also access patient accounts from either facility, which lets them address any questions from patients without contacting the other center.
Here are four other IT-related projects that Mr. Ashby has overseen at the two facilities.
1. Physician office access to schedule.
There is a pain management physician whose office is in the same building as the new facility. His office has been granted direct access Audubon ASC’s scheduling system, letting the physician’s staff schedule his thousands of cases annually at the time they are booked, rather than doubling the work by having the ASC staff enter them later.
“What that allows us to do is that it saves me the time and money to have someone to do that for us and it gives them better access and control because they can see what’s happening with the schedule,” says Mr. Ashby. “So far it seems to be working well.”
It’s an experimental program at the moment, but Mr. Ashby says there is consideration to give other physicians’ offices access as well.
“If they have a block schedule, they would be able to schedule their cases in that block time and in that room,” he says. “They could put those patients in and put them where they want to put them and move them around without us necessarily having to do that for them. There’s a lot of interest in this from the physicians.”
2. Web site as a patient tool.
The Audubon Surgery Center is using its Web site as a tool to help patients and the center at once. On the Web site, patients can fill out pre-op questionnaires for their surgery.
“This allows them answer the standard questions that would normally be answered on the telephone with the pre-op call,” says Mr. Ashby. “We’re trying to do more of that to streamline some of that process so that patients can do that online versus having to do that on the phone. This way, they can do it any time. Probably 20 percent of our patients are doing that right now and over time, we’ll see more of a movement to that end.”
This streamlines work for the center, because physicians often hold off on scheduling until just a few days before they want to perform a cases because they are focused on ensuring insurance coverage for the patient, says Mr. Ashby.
“And yet the patient knows they’re having surgery two to three weeks beforehand, so if the patient sends that in to us, we at least know that’s coming and we can kind of plan on it and prepare for it even if we don’t have the actual schedule in front of us,” he says. “We’ll see more of that in the future.”
Mr. Ashby says the center will increasingly sue the Internet as a tool for patients. He eventually pictures the ASC’s Web site letting patients access their account, view its status and possibly to make payments online.
3. Reduction of paper records.
A challenge that faces Audubon Surgery Center and many active surgery centers is rapid accumulation of paper records.
“What do you do with all of that? There’s a limited amount of storage space,” says Mr. Ashby. “Your options are to take it off-site and store it somewhere, which can get fairly expensive, not to mention cumbersome. Or come up with a different mechanism.”
That different mechanism for Audubon Surgery Center came in the form of a Canon scanner. A person comes to the ASC several times each week to scan charts that are two to three months old (if the patients do not have outstanding balance). The scanned charts are stored on a CD and labeled by patient numbers; the CDs are searchable, so patient records are easily retrievable.
“If we ever have to go back and bring up an old report, which happens quite frequently, we can do that and print out the report and have everything just as if we made a regular copy of a chart that was sitting in a file cabinet somewhere,” says Mr. Ashby. “That’s been a huge advantage because now we don’t have to store all of the old charts. Once we do the scanning, we take the old chart and shred it.”
4. Develop an EMR and paper hybrid.
Mr. Ashby says the next step in this process is to integrate scanning more regularly so that the center avoids having paper records for even two to three months. While it may seem like this would be the perfect equation for an electronic medical record system, Mr. Ashby says the center isn’t ready to commit to such a system entirely.
“The big drawbacks in doing an EMR system, the way that most of them are designed, is that most of the nurses in the OR are not really computer savvy and not really comfortable taking a computer and trying to use it to generate a record,” he says.
The solution is what Mr. Ashby describes as a hybrid method — a cross between an EMR and a paper record. The center takes all documents sent to it from physician offices, labs or other locations (which are generally faxed to the facility) and physician operative reports (which are often e-mailed to the center) and instead of printing these documents, stores them in a digital format in a folder linked to the patient.
The center still lets its nurses to create and use a paper medical record, but at the end of the day, scans that medical record into the system, links it to the patient and the digital folder, then destroys the paper record.
“This way we’re able to let the nurses continue to do their routine the way they’re used to but we meet our objective of getting rid of the paper and storing most of the documents electronically,” he says.
Learn more about Audubon Surgery Center.
Note: Hear from more IT leaders in ASCs in the Nov./Dec. Becker’s ASC Review.
