Maimonides Medical Center Eliminates Mountains of Paper with ASG-Report.Web™
Industry: Health Care
Location: New York, USA
Maimonides Medical Center is the premier provider of health services and the hospital of choice in the communities they serve, particularly Southern Brooklyn. They are accessible and compassionate and strive to perform at the highest possible level as recognized by a wide range of customers, including patients, physicians, employees, and the community.
The Challenge
Too much paper—that is what the computer mainframe at Maimonides Medical
Center in Brooklyn, NY, generated. The result was too many lost or
late reports, too many reports to be copied and distributed to departments
and offsite clinics, overuse of storage space and wasted staff time.
In addition, the cost for paper usage and printer ribbons totaled
$120,000 a year, combined with the use of expensive high-speed printers
in the data center, which required continuous maintenance and attention.
Maimonides already had a server-based paperless report viewing system, but the cost of upgrading all PCs and buying software licenses for all users, especially those who only occasionally needed access to reports, was prohibitive. As a result, Webmaster Ed Lane researched inexpensive Web-based solutions that could be accessed through their existing intranet.
The Solution
Lane reviewed three products, attending paperless-host printing seminars and vendor
demos, before deciding on ASG-Report.Web™
by ASG. Maimonides made the decision
based on ease of use for administration and users, functionality, cost, low software
and hardware requirements, and the commitment of the vendor to support the product.
ASG-Report.Web, a paperless report viewer, gave users Web-enabled access on demand to reports in electronic format from their desktops. Users can now select and print only those reports or pages they need. Additionally, they can import report data directly into spreadsheets for analysis instead of re-keying the information from paper.
Measurable Results
Implementation of the new system has resulted in: information reaching desktops
throughout the 200 staff-member network promptly; increased productivity with immediate
online access to vast amounts of information; elimination of lost or late reports;
reduction of paper usage. With the cost reduction in paper and printer ribbons and
elimination of 1.5 full-time equivalents for printing and distributing large reports,
the system paid for itself in 2.5 years. Since Maimonides began using ASG-Report.Web
five years ago, it has saved $304,000 in expenses.
“We upgraded to an IBM Netfinity 5600 server with dual Pentium III 866 Mhz processors and 1 Ghz RAM with 30 gig of hard disk space,” says Lane. “This new upgrade has enhanced search capabilities, searching by word or name using XML technology.”
Using their secure intranet, more than 500 ASG-Report.Web users generated 115,576 hits in the past six months. Report.Web can take any text file produced by any hospital-based system, including legacy applications, and convert text to HTML/XML/PDF formats.
Lane says, “We have expanded the information available to our users to include daily operating room schedules from Surgi Server, clinic pull-chart lists, pre-edit billing rejections, radiology charge rejections, transfer interface errors, physician schedules, ambulatory Medicare tape remittance errors, no-show patients and patient re-admits in the last month.
“Having this kind of information available has enabled us to improve cash flow, correct billing and interface errors immediately, and to improve our business and clinical processes.”
Maimonides also has recently integrated the use of handheld devices, wireless technology, and Web-based applications into the Report.Web network. Lane says, “Now clinical reports will be available anytime. What once took pounds of paper now fits in my shirt pocket.” Using the new Compaq iPAQ Pocket PC 3650 HTML, XML XLS spreadsheets and PDF files can be viewed in ASG-Report.Web on WinCE/Pocket PC devices using Pocket Internet Explorer. 128-bit encryption has also been added to Pocket Internet Explorer on the Pocket PC for added security over wired and wireless networks.
This story first appeared in the March 2000 edition of Health Management Technology .
