Document Management Software and Healthcare Software (Allscripts and FileHold)
Introduction
Healing Touch Home Healthcare provides a complete range of dedicated home healthcare services, meeting the needs of adults and children in the comfort of their own home. Services offered through Healing Touch Home Healthcare includes skilled nursing, home health aides, pediatric care, physical, occupational, speech and infusion therapy. Headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, they have been in business since 2004.
Business Problem
Healing Touch Home Healthcare needed to replace their paper patient health records stored in physical metal filing cabinets with electronic records stored in a document management system while maintaining strict HIPAA guidelines. Searching for information needed to be flexible while maintaining security. HIPAA has rules that must be adhered to protect the privacy and security of certain health information. HIPAA is the federal law that establishes standards for the privacy and security of health information, as well as standards for electronic data interchange of health information.
The system needed to be customizable to fit the needs of Healing Touch Home Healthcare instead of having to conform to the application design. They did not want to have to significantly change the way that they do business.
The system also needed to integrate with their current health information technology system, Allscripts Homecare, which is a fully integrated home care system that automates processes such as patient intake, billing, and account receivables. Healing Touch Home Healthcare uses Allscripts in the overall operations of the agency such as scheduling staff, complying with doctor’s orders and ensuring staff meet regulatory compliance requirements.
The Solution
After attending the public webinar and logging into the demonstration server, it was determined that FileHold met the needs of Healing Touch Home Healthcare.
While configuring the system, they were able to set up unique schemas and associated metadata that was relevant to their organization. No special customization of the product was needed as they were able to configure the system how they wanted right out of the box.
In order to integrate FileHold with Allscripts, database lookups for metadata fields and schemas were configured. This allowed for the extraction of patient names and ID numbers from the Allscripts database into the metadata fields for the patient records that were being scanned into FileHold. By using the Managed Imports functionality, PDF documents along with their corresponding xml content from Allscripts was able to be automatically imported into the repository.
Business Benefits
Being able to pull patient information from the Allscripts database eliminated error and enhanced efficiency greatly by not needing to maintain two separate databases which could lead to inconsistency. The automation of pulling patient information from Allscripts into the metadata fields of the records stored in FileHold is saving approximately 30 hours overall per week in data entry time.
Moving from a paper-based organization allowed them to eliminate approximately 75% of their paper storage at their facility. Before FileHold, Healing Touch Home Healthcare was filling one box of paper per week; now it is down to one box per every two months. Information is organized in a secure, logical manner and allows for finding patient information quickly and easily.
Other benefits of the system included:
- Able to scale and grow our business while constantly adapting to changing health care policies.
- Able to utilize workflows for the review and approval of timesheets.
- Are able to customize naming conventions for files to keep document names consistent in the library.
- Are able to receive alerts when a document is added to a subscribed folder.
- Are able to setup reminders on documents that require attention on a periodic basis.
- Can review the lifecycle of a document and its usage.
- Set up customized views for each individual users to showcase what is relevant to their job task.
"FileHold is an application that is thoughtfully created with the end user in mind. It is an application that can meet the goals of a small sized organization all the way to a large sized corporation. We’ve transitioned from a paper based agency to a semi-paperless agency while still doing business our way. This was all possible because of the way FileHold was structured and its flexibility/scalability with itself and also its ability to integrate with other vendors."
– Director of Compliance, Healing Touch