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ibml recently announced that the Wyoming Medical Center reduced its scanning and indexing staff by 33 percent -- representing about $75,000 to $100,000 a year in labor costs -- and cleared out nearly 1,500 square feet of records by implementing an ImageTrac scanning solution from ibml. The ImageTrac solution will pay for itself in the first two years as a result of reduced labor costs and will save Wyoming Medical Center up to $450,000 over a five year period.

The Wyoming Medical Center is a 205-bed not-for-profit (501c3) acute care hospital in Casper, Wyoming, in the center of the state. Its campus covers approximately four city blocks with 719,000 square feet of space. With its 150 physicians on staff, Wyoming Medical Center offers 50 specialties with two Centers of Excellence.

After an extensive search for a more efficient solution for scanning patient records, Wyoming Medical Center selected the ImageTrac scanner from ibml. Designed for high-speed scanning, the ImageTrac scans about 257 documents a minute and 13,107 pages per hour. Other features include barcode recognition, form recognition and ultrasonic page recognition, which helps eliminate double-feeds and manual counting.

Nick Belveal, RHIA, director of HIMS, Wyoming Medical Center, said the hospital chose the ImageTrac scanners because, "The speed is impressive, the double-feed detector works well, and the exporter makes it easy to re-scan documents, if necessary."

One advantage of the ImageTrac for Wyoming Medical Center was the elimination of manual page counting. With the hospital's old scanners, each page had to be counted to ensure two pages weren't pulled through at the same time during the scanning process; the hospital needed to safeguard the quality of the scanned record. But this also had a big impact on productivity: scanning accounted for 8 percent of the hospital's processing time, while counting pages accounted for 70 percent. Eliminating this step, coupled with an increase in scanning time and speed, resulted in a productivity spike of 800 percent.

By increasing the amount of time spent scanning medical records, rather than counting pages, Wyoming Medical Center also was able to significantly boost its daily production rate from 7,000 pages per day to 52,000 pages per day. The difference of pages the hospital scanned in a six-month period totaled more than 5.4 million pages.

Another benefit of the ImageTrac platform was its barcode recognition capabilities, which allow for documents to be identified and indexed automatically using a barcode, resulting in less manual intervention. ibml's page recognition functionality was another benefit to the hospital. Distinct forms can be automatically recognized and indexed. This increases the accuracy of page identification, reduces manual intervention and improves productivity.

Additionally, once all of its medical records are available online, fewer personnel will be needed for releasing information, running records to the emergency room and hospital floors, or faxing information to physician offices. This will provide ongoing labor cost savings.

"A lot of people are talking about electronic medical records, and thanks to ibml, Wyoming Medical Center already has taken a big step in that direction," Belveal said. "As a result of implementing ibml scanners, WMC has maximized productivity, reduced our document management labor costs by 33 percent, and decreased our long-term operations expenses."

Belveal added that once all of the hospital's records are online, "they will be at the fingertips of our staff and physicians -- increasing operations productivity and improving patient care."

For a complete case study on Wyoming Medical Center, visit www.ibml.com.

About ibml
ibml provides intelligent scanning and document capture solutions that drive business process improvements from the point of capture -- whether it's a high-volume centralized operation or a remote office. Combining hardware, software and services, ibml's comprehensive solutions automate the most demanding document applications in banking, financial services, healthcare, government services, outsourcing and more. Every day, hundreds of ibml customers across 34 countries use our technology to capture millions of document images.

SOURCE: ibml