Online access to records

Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS) is a family of hospitals serving the 468,000 citizens of the city of Hamilton and more than two million residents of Central-South Ontario, Canada. HHS is one of Canada’s largest teaching hospitals. Its staff, physicians and volunteers provide a comprehensive range of acute, non-acute and specialized services, catering to health care needs from preconception to aging adults.

The Challenge
Although Hamilton Health Sciences operates its four hospitals on four campuses as a single, combined facility, each hospital had its own independent health records department, resulting in significant challenges managing patient health records.

With the consolidation of the hospitals and the growing number of patients, the paper health records at HHS were becoming difficult to manage. And, with 10 million pages of patient records being generated annually, filing rooms in the Health Records Department were overflowing, making it difficult to file and retrieve records.

How CGI Helped
CGI implemented Sovera® Health Information Management, an enterprise content management system.  This new system provided a single, consolidated medical records platform and a single, consistent set of patient record indexing for the online storage, retrieval and workflow of patient records across all HHS facilities that is tightly integrated with the health systems clinical information system – MEDITECH.

The Results
By scanning and storing health records electronically, Sovera has eliminated most of HHS’s health records management problems.  Additional benefits include:

• Freed up considerable storage space that can now be better used for patient care delivery.
• Eliminated the problems associated with trying to collect and combine patient information from multiple facilities.
• Allowed for anytime, anywhere access to charts so that physicians can quickly and easily login to the Sovera system, even from home – to review charts, add their own notes, and resolve chart deficiencies.
• Coding and abstracting of medical records no longer bound by the constraints and locale of the paper record.

The bottom line: Hamilton Health Sciences has increased access to electronic health records enabling physicians to quickly access and maintain charts.

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