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Cleveland orthopedic practice utilizes Fortis to meet HIPAA compliancy and sees over $150,000 in savings

Founded in 1969, Horizon Orthopedic, Inc. has a solid and distinguished reputation as a premier group of physicians providing non-operative and surgical orthopedic care to the greater Cleveland, Ohio area. The group is comprised of seven physicians and 42 employees staffing four regional offices and one imaging center. With their latest technological advancement of creating electronic medical records, they are slated to save over $150,000 in filing costs, supplies, outsourcing labor and copying fees over the next two years.

Federal healthcare regulations including HIPAA, Medicare and Stark II have set the stage for making electronic medical records a primary goal for the health care industry. In addition to addressing privacy issues, HIPAA establishes a standard for electronic processing of health care claims include establishing security measures for all electronic data and an audit trail to specifically identify who is accessing health information. Medicare legislation calls for the elimination of written prescriptions requiring all new prescriptions and refills to be done electronically.

With this in mind and armed with a strategic plan to strengthen its presence in the regional health care market, Horizon Orthopedic set out to improve their responsiveness to patients and outside physicians, increase turnaround time and improve access to complete information. Rather than spending time hunting for patient charts, the focus would be on easy chart location and immediate access to patient information – saving time for both the physician and patient. This included having complete medical records available and accessible to the physician and to the entire organization’s multiple sites.

Aside from cutting access time in half, Horizon Orthopedics’ goals include a

return on investment within 10 months of deploying Fortis, and an annual cost reduction of over $8,000 by eliminating off-site storage services.

“Any healthcare provider can attest that the ‘Chart Hunt’ is the bane of the healthcare profession and an issue the industry and the federal government have struggled with for years,” says Jennifer Aponte, practice administrator and chief executive officer. “As an orthopedic medical provider, we rely heavily on diagnostic X-rays and MRI images in addition to information contained in the patient’s chart. We used to rely on films being hand-carried by the patient, transported between offices or the physician would have to leave one office to review a film at another of our locations. Sometimes the patient is visiting within the hour, for an urgent, unscheduled visit. Access to current patient information could be compromised by something as simple as a patient office note not inserted properly in a chart or the chart not timely located. One missing piece would have a domino effect. A note for a patient could easily be needed at five different places because various departments needed to view information in the chart—people were making copies of copies, etc.,” she says.

Horizon Orthopedic also wanted to reduce short-term and long-term storage costs, gain the ability to retrieve from off-site storage and the flexibility to work with information from various sources in multiple formats.

While on a site visit to Northern Rockies Orthopaedics, Missoula, Mont., Aponte, was introduced to Westbrook Technologies document management software solutions. After examining other software offerings including Omni, eCabinet and DocIT, Horizon Orthopedic chose Westbrook Technologies’ Fortis. “We chose Westbrook Technologies’ Fortis for its use of ‘best of breed’ technology,” says Aponte. “We saw that it is a proven business tool across industries and a scalable solution that we could rollout to our multiple sites.”

Horizon Orthopedics’ wide area network (WAN) allows all four offices access to Fortis providing quick and easy retrieval of EOBs (Explanation of Benefit forms) and patient claim information. Employee files and benefits information are securely stored and Human Resources can monitor accountability for timely performances and authorize access to information using Audit Trail. This option enables a Fortis administrator to track document-related user activities to ensure unauthorized activities are not occurring. Other documents stored in the Fortis system include contracts, leases; purchase agreements, licensure, credentialing and other operating information are archived on the system.

By converting patient records to an electronic format, Aponte and her system development staff were careful not change the workflow especially for physicians already pressed for time. “We used the same nine categories our staff is used to completing for each patient and simply transferred the same format into Fortis,” says Aponte. Color tabs reflecting each category’s title were duplicated creating a standardized layout, she explains. Forms have also been bar coded depicting which type of document it is. “Our physicians have adapted to electronic patient records very quickly and are able to access a patient’s information within a minute.”