Any industry can benefit from moving to a paperless office (or workplace). What may surprise you is that it’s also disrupting all industries—not just technology or information. Going paperless completely transformed how health care provider Friendship Heights Rehabilitation tracked income and provided top-quality care to their patients.
Two weeks ago in our post, Information Flow in the Paperless Office, we discussed Bill Gates’ book, Business @ the Speed of Thought, and his take on the all-digital office. In chapter four, Gates identifies health care, with its time consuming and expensive administrative processes, to be one of the top three areas that a paperless workflow would be most effective. Therese Rodda, owner and Executive Director of Friendship Heights Rehabilitation Center, took this direction and ran when she digitized her practice. Doing so resulted in a direct reduction of inefficiencies and improved quality of care and profitability within the first year of making the switch.
Today, administrative overhead makes up nearly 30 percent of US health care costs. Health care providers and patients also pay the price in time lost. Therese Rodda says, “I spent about 40 percent of my time orchestrating the office’s administrative duties.” Her staff members “spent a disproportionate amount of time standing at the fax machine, sending faxes to doctors, and insurance companies,” and manually scheduling patient visits and writing patient notes.
She knew it was time to update her clinic’s IT infrastructure: “It was getting to the point where I just didn’t have time to see patients anymore;” so she reached out to District Computers, an IT consulting company based in Washington, DC. They recommended that Rodda deploy an “all-in-one” server solution based on Windows Server 2008, a package that gave her remote access, shared storage and workplaces, and backup/ restore capabilities, among many other capabilities.
The clinic soon saw a huge transformation: no more having to decipher doctor’s notes or deliver prescription orders to the pharmacy. Instead, patient charts and doctor’s orders are instantly available, transferred, and shared. Rodda even incorporated three tablet PCs into her practice for therapists to use during patient evaluations and to write charts between visits. Her therapists could enter notes directly onto the tablet PC, save them to a folder on the server, and share them directly with referring doctors.
The paperless office streamlined processes, reducing the amount of hassle for healthcare providers. For patients, the result was better continuity of care—decreasing the risk of medical error. For Friendship Heights, going digital meant that “[staff members] can focus on what they do best: helping patients to recover from injuries or to enjoy a better quality of life,” says Rodda. Relieved of their paper burden, health care providers can spend more time actually dealing with patients.
Finally, Rodda reports that the clinic is seeing 30 percent more patients than it did before. “Personally, I’ve been able to see four more patients a week, which boosts not only our revenues, but also my level of work satisfaction.” At Friendship Heights, not only can health care providers work more efficiently but even the cash flow is greatly improved. The clinic is being reimbursed 30 to 40 percent faster from insurance companies because documents, saved as PDFs, can be sent directly to insurers from the computer.
In health care, efficient administrative processes directly improve quality of care and profitability. By going paperless, Friendship Heights was able to streamline administrative tasks and double their business within a single year. Profitability aside, efficiencies in the health care system are important for all of us because whether or not we’re health care providers, we’re all health care consumers.