The Certified Process Excellence Leader (CPEL) program at Kettering Health Network aims to empower employees to continue improving processes. Since its inception, the program has helped the network implement innovative ways to make improvements.
A recent initiative of the CPEL program significantly reduced the time it takes for patient documents to be scanned and available in the electronic medical record.
CPEL project manager: Heather Lammon, Epic HIM Senior Analyst. Lammon has been with Kettering Health Network for nine years.
Background: The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) is an organization that is dedicated to improving health care quality, safety, cost-effectiveness, and access through the best use of information technology and management systems. HIMSS provides hospitals with a score from zero to seven to indicate how well the hospital is meeting established requirements.
One area Kettering Health Network was not meeting stage seven requirements was in 24-hour document scanning. On average, turnaround time for document scanning in the network was 59.69 hours. Timely access to documents in Epic is crucial for clinicians to make the best decisions and provide continuity of care. The timeliness of document scanning has the potential to improve patient safety and maintain a higher-quality medical record.
Objective: At the start of the project, the average time for a patient’s documents to be scanned and available in the electronic medical record was 59.69 hours. The objective was to decrease this timeframe to less than 24 hours by the end of 2018.
Method: With the support of Brenda Kuhn, chief quality officer for Kettering Health Network and the project sponsor; Angela Rodenfels, operations director of HIM; and a multi-disciplinary team; Lammon facilitated Value Stream Analysis (VSA) to identify the areas of focus for improvement. VSA is a system that helps to lay out high-level processes and identify bottlenecks and areas of opportunity. The VSA team identified areas of opportunity to reduce batching that contributed to an average of 37.86 hours of delay in the overall process. Additionally, the current flow involved five hand-offs where paper documents moved from one team or department to another.
The primary strategy for reducing hand-offs, unnecessary paper movement, and time was to get scanning to occur closer to the point of use, or the location of document intake. The team piloted the new scanning process at Sycamore Medical Center in the surgery unit, and after reviewing the initial results, the process was rolled out to the rest of the hospital.
Results: By the project’s completion, the timeframe for patient’s documents to be scanned and available in the electronic medical record dropped from 59.69 hours to 10.96 hours, showing an improvement of 81.64%.