Case Study: Ottawa Fertility Centre

Automated scanning of patient medical information.

About The Ottawa Fertility Centre

The Ottawa Fertility Centre (OFC) provides comprehensive fertility services within a state-of-the-art facility through its team of highly experienced physicians, nurses and scientists. The OFC offers quality care and services in one location, with an emphasis on the safety and well-being of patients.

“Ricoh demonstrated that the company had automated scanning and data workflow solutions that could grow with our needs.”
Mark Evans
Managing Director
Ottawa Fertility Centre

Challenge

The Ottawa Fertility Centre (OFC) had converted many of its medical records to electronic format. The challenge was to effectively and securely integrate the more than 250 paper-based documents and other information the OFC receives by fax, mail and courier every day.

Converting documents would ensure that they could be stored more securely on the Centre’s Electronic Medical Record system (EMR). However the OFC had limited resources to carry out the conversion on a daily basis.

The OFC needed to ensure that paper records conversion was done so in an error free manner, were associated with the right patient and ended up on the EMR where the right physician could access the right information at the right time.

Solution

Ricoh used an advanced image capture solution to automate the electronic capture of patient information and to store captured information on the OFC’s EMR system.

Using Ricoh's advanced imaging solution, Ricoh Canada’s Professional Services Team designed custom scripts to facilitate communication to and from OFC’s EMR system.

The Ricoh solution connects scanned information to the patient name or demographic ID and to the document type or document name, as determined by the OFC scanning operator.
Documents are then routed to the appropriate physician network folder as required. The EMR database is then updated to indicate the document has been scanned, where it is located and the information contained within the document.

Results

The advanced capture solution and customized database scripts have allowed the clinic to realize enhanced workflows, higher levels of accuracy, greater throughput of scanned and electronic documents and Health Level 7 (HL7) compliant integration with the EMR system.

With Ricoh’s electronic storage system, only authorized individuals see documents, and the OFC can audit electronic access to all retrieved documents.

The automated system cut manual scanning time from what would have taken a full day, every day, to about three hours per day.

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