"Our team needed to improve our customer service by distributing patient records in readable-CD form, while ensuring the new workflow did not add a lot of extra steps for the staff to endure" says Sexton, "Nitro Pro was very user friendly and easy to train our staff on."
Debbie Sexton
Medical Records Director
MHS

Company overview

Founded in Illinois in 1897, Memorial Health System (MHS) is a national leading healthcare organization. Dedicated to providing comprehensive and compassionate patient care, MHS offers a wide range of specialized research and treatment centers, including the Regional Cancer Center, Regional Burn Center and Memorial Heart and Vascular Institute.

The business challenge

Regulated by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), MHS is required to ensure the confidentiality of all medical records, as well as adhere to stringent security requirements when providing patients with a copy of their records.

Previously, the Medical Records team at MHS employed a paper-based system, maintaining a file for each patient and manually copying pages as requested. As MHS treats thousands of patients each day, with hundreds submitting Release of Information requests, the resources required to prepare, copy, and deliver the highly-sensitive documents were becoming excessive and increasingly difficult to manage. Additionally, many tech-savvy patients expressed an interest in obtaining electronic copies which would enable them to maintain records on their personal computers, lessening the chance that the documents could later be misplaced, lost, and/or damaged.

Memorial Health System realized that they could easily improve patient satisfaction and reduce overall operational costs by providing electronic copies of records upon request. In order to comply with HIPAA regulations, the electronic format used would require data encryption support. The format would also need to be platform-independent and universal, ensuring patients would be able to open the file on their personal computers.

"Our team needed to improve our customer service by distributing patient records in readable-CD form, while ensuring the new workflow did not add a lot of extra steps for the staff to endure," said Debbie Sexton, Medical Records Director at MHS, adding that, with a large team tasked with managing information requests, the new solution would need to be easy to learn and use, minimizing training time and requiring little specialized technical knowledge to operate once in place.

Identifying PDF as the format of choice due to its inherent security features and the ubiquity of PDF viewers, MHS began searching for a simple PDF creation tool that could be used to create secure electronic copies of their patients' records.

The solution

Following a brief internet search, the team at Memorial Health System found Nitro PDF Professional and made the decision to purchase. With a robust feature list, user-friendly interface, and enterprise-level support options, the organization was confident that Nitro Pro would meet all project requirements and immediately set to work implementing a process for providing electronic copies of patient records.

Using Nitro Pro, the Medical Records staff can now create an electronic copy of a patient's file by placing a page on their scanner and selecting the 'Create PDF from Scanner' option in the Nitro Pro interface. The user is allowed to scan as many pages as necessary and, once they are finished, the pages are merged into a single PDF.

With Nitro Pro’s 128-bit security options, the Medical Records staff can also apply a password to the final PDF, which must be entered before the PDF can be opened and viewed on any computer. The PDF is then provided to the patient via CD, allowing patients to maintain their records on a portable disk or copy it to their own computers.

Results

The Nitro PDF Professional solution has offered the security and flexibility necessary to ensure both HIPAA regulations and customer requirements are successfully met at MHS.

With the deployment of Nitro Pro, Memorial Health System was able to:

• Significantly reduce the time required to process Release of Information requests.
• Secure sensitive patient information and comply with strict HIPAA confidentiality requirements.
• Eliminate paper waste and other costs associate with creating physical copies of patient records.
• Increase customer satisfaction through the introduction of a more efficient and modern method of delivering record copies.

The software has also met Memorial Health System's ease-of-use requirements, with minimal disruption to the Medical Department's workflow and no reported technical support issues since deployment and initial user instruction on the new system. “Nitro Pro was very user friendly and easy to train our staff on,” says Sexton.