Los Angeles County Childre Medical Services Streamlines Costly Paper Handling with EMC

ATLANTA, GA – HIMSS10 - March 03, 2010 -

EMC® Corporation (NYSE:EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced that the Los Angeles County Children's Medical Services (CMS) group has implemented a case management system based on EMC Documentum® xCP and EMC Captiva® InputAccel® to electronically capture, index and store thousands of patient-related documents received daily. With the new case management system, CMS has improved patient care, reduced operational expenses, increased caregiver productivity and streamlined compliance with state and federal laws.

As part of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, CMS manages approximately 48,000 active patient cases and has nearly 1,000 employees—mostly nurses, physical and occupational therapists and case managers—providing health care services to children from its headquarters and 65 remote locations.

"We receive on average 5,000 pages of documents from several providers via fax and mail each day – patient records, lab reports, claim forms and so on," said John Eid, Director of Information Systems, County of Los Angeles Department of Public Health. "These documents are manually sorted according to our complex criteria and filed into physical folders. The process is not only time-consuming; inevitably, there were filing errors and lost documents. And if a lost or misfiled document is required to meet HIPAA compliance, CMS could face a lawsuit or government-issued penalties. Most important, it could affect our ability to manage patient cases and deliver quality care."

CMS was also spending an inordinate amount of time and cost in managing and physically storing tens of thousands of patient records. Studies show that manually filing a single patient record costs more than $20 and searching for a misfiled record can cost up to $120.

To address these challenges, CMS worked with EMC consulting partner Burntsand to deploy an automated case management system. Using Captiva, the documents received by fax and mail are captured, identified and indexed. Once transformed into digital content, documents and data are delivered to the Documentum repository and securely stored as part of an electronic patient case folder. CMS practitioners and case managers are notified when new documents are online.

"The integrated Captiva and Documentum solution has enabled us to create a modern-age digital office for medical records. We have audit trails for paper records now and we're capturing every unique form related to a case in the electronic chart," said Eid. "With easier, more reliable access to critical patient information, our caregivers can make better decisions and more quickly. The bottom line is we're enhancing patient care and providing more responsive, efficient case management.

"We will be saving hundreds of thousands of dollars annually on staff time that's no longer needed for document handling and reduced space requirements for storing new documents that stream into our offices," added Eid. "There's also significant cost avoidance related to more efficient and reliable compliance with patient confidentiality regulations."

CMS is the first group in the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health to implement an electronic charts solution and the first in Los Angeles County to implement Documentum. Because of the successful deployment at CMS, the Board of Supervisors has named EMC the county’s sole provider of enterprise content management solutions.

In the second half of 2010, CMS will begin scanning documents and charts that existed prior to the implementation. The entire system will also be upgraded with forms recognition, a fax server environment and workflow automation.

"We had a great experience working with Burntsand," said Eid. "We were especially impressed with their professionalism, knowledge and focus in designing the case management system as well as providing end-user training."