One of the big frustrations of the 300-plus physician group practice at Riverside Health System was not getting advanced notice from the emergency department (ED) when it had seen one of the group’s patients. Often, after a visit to the ED, a patient is told to follow up with his/her primary care doctor in the next few days. However, when a patient arrives at the clinic, the primary care doctor struggles to provide continuity of care because he lacks information from the ED.
In an effort to have the findings from the ED, the physician gets the office staff to call the emergency room to obtain the missing information. At this point, the ED has to secure the patient’s file and appropriate paperwork in order to send it to the practice.
Riverside needed a way to automatically log patients out of its ED in order to provide caregivers accurate, up-to-date information. Previously, the person in the Medical Records department would spend eight hours per day updating the registration system to log out patients. “Using Boston WorkStation against our Siemens Invision system, we can now log these patients out in less than one hour. The result is not only a more efficient registration process in the ED, but also a free full-time employee to use in a more substantial capacity,” added Foss.