Hospitals treat patients, but they produce a lot of documents. So much so that the largest hospitals have entire departments for managing their records. As a clinic, you produce a ton of documents too, but it’s a lot harder to maintain when you only have so many hands and hours in the day.
Whether you’re a caregiver or in administration, ensuring that the clinic is keeping diligent records is everyone’s responsibility. Making sure that records are being handled in a responsible and organized manner isn’t just for the sake of compliance, but is part of delivering quality care to patients that depend on you to keep their protected health information both safe and accessible for future care needs.
The common solution found in a hospital are electronic health records (EHR) systems or electronic medical records (EMR) systems. These are specialized solutions built for managing large volumes of medical records as well as sharing those records with other healthcare organizations. However, EHR and EMR solutions are large databases that are costly and complicated to operate. It usually takes specialized training in order to properly use one of these systems. Furthermore, many EHR and EMRs only handle specific types of medical forms and not all of your documents.
So where does document management software come in?
Document management is a lightweight database system that can help you manage nearly any type of document. DMS systems such as Rubex by eFileCabinet are built to be used in nearly any industry and can be customized for specific needs such as storing healthcare records in an organized and compliant manner. But what really sets it apart and makes it the perfect solution for small businesses, including clinics, is its ability to phase out certain manual processes that are a big resource drain.
Automated Filing
There is a method to automate the task of filing documents into your digital system as soon as they’re created. Whether they’re digital or physical, with some preconfiguring, you can set up your system to immediately process documents and sort them into the correct location according to the rules you set.
This is done with Zonal OCR, which is optical character recognition software that captures the text from a document, whether it’s being digitized with a scanner or uploaded from a device. It recognizes the text from image files of documents and translates it into data the software can then factor in and manipulate. Templates of standard forms inform the program of what text it needs to capture and assign it a category.
For example, you’d likely have a template for a standard clinical visit form. The template for this form would likely capture the patient’s name, basic info, the date, the date of their last visit, and any other data relevant to the filing and searching of the document.
Next, there are automating filing rules that dictate where your scanned and processed documents go. You can base your rules on certain factors such as patient name or ID number, essentially telling the system what patient folder it needs to go to. Further rules can be added such as dates, allowing you to sort records through subfolders based on year or month in the patient folder.
What if this is a new patient? If the system doesn’t recognize the document as belonging to an existing folder, you can set it to automatically create the folder.
Simply put, this tool makes it easier for everyone at the clinic to do dedicate less time filing paperwork. Onboarding patients is easy since all you have to do is scan in their ID, insurance card and previous medial papers. No more manual data entry, which saves you money and leaves you more time to giving quality service to the patient.
Secure File Sharing
Next, hospitals use EHRs and EMRs for the purpose of sharing patient health records (with the patient’s consent) with other providers. This can’t be done by sending an email attachment. That would fly in the face of HIPAA compliance, which requires some form of encryption or equivalent solution.
You don’t have to dedicate a large portion of your budget to a health solution for sharing documents. Rubex by eFileCabinet is a document management solution that features a secure file-sharing feature right from the interface.
It works by sending the recipient a link to a guest account on your system. This creates a secure connection that includes 256-bit AES and SSL/TLS, A.K.A. two-way and one-way encryption. This is much safer, rather than having protected health information just sitting in a third-party email server.
Rubex by eFileCabinet is the optimal solution for small healthcare providers needing a better solution for managing documents. It provides quicker and easier solutions for problems once thought only resolvable with bulky and expensive EHR and EMR software. Now it comes lightweight, economical, and most importantly, easy to use. Plus it’s completely configurable to be HIPAA compliant.
To see Rubex in action, click here to set up a free, personalized demo.
