Access Celebrates National Health IT Week by Helping More Hospitals Integrate Electronic Patient Signatures, Clinical Data and E-Forms with EHRs

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Working with Access to make our forms electronic, to add electronic signatures to them and to send them into EHRs is helping us reach our goal.

Sulphur Springs, Texas (PRWEB) September 18, 2013

For the past eight years, the National Health Information Technology Week has brought together healthcare providers, IT vendors, consumer groups and others dedicated to advancing patient care through wider adoption of healthcare IT solutions.

As it commemorates this week, Access continues to help more hospitals advance their EHR initiatives with paperless integration solutions for electronic patient signatures, clinical data and e-forms.

One such hospital is Pacific Alliance Medical Center (PAMC) in Los Angeles. To help move its electronic health records (EHR) project forward, PAMC decided to deploy an enterprise content management system.

To make the most of this system, the hospital team recognized that they needed to replace preprinted paper forms with e-forms, which would enable them to stop scanning and manually indexing documents. In addition, units would never again run out of forms if they were managed electronically, updating forms wouldn’t require waiting for a print vendor, and paper-related costs would be minimized.

They chose Access to make the change from paper-based to electronic forms.

“Our primary goal is to have a 100 percent electronic health record,” says John Brown, CIO at PAMC. “Will that ever be a reality? Maybe not. But working with Access to make our forms electronic, to add electronic signatures to them and to send them into EHRs is helping us reach our ultimate goal.”

PAMC decided to take their paperless plan to the next level by also deploying Access’s electronic patient signature solution. With this, patients quickly apply a secure electronic signature to their admissions packets, which are sent directly into the correct EHRs along with unique biometrics that reduce liability.

“The staff in admitting sees a lot of benefits from Access e-Signature. Instead of patients rifling through papers, they can authorize their forms from one device. Everything is legible, it transmits to MEDITECH and it’s all in one forms package,” Brown said.

Another solution that is helping hospitals fast-forward their EHR projects is Access’s clinical data bridge. KershawHealth, a multifacility healthcare system in South Carolina, recognized that it needed a way to get clinical output into EHRs without a manual, paper-intensive process.

Now, a nurse chooses the Access system as a virtual printer, and a patient’s EKG trace is sent directly into the correct patient’s EHR. KershawHealth will soon extend its use of the clinical data bridge to perinatal documents created in GE Centricity, Compumedics Sleep, and then to data output from ScottCare’s cardio rehab system.

“Access offered us unlimited feeds so we could expand their clinical data bridge to many systems and devices. For the price one of our other vendors charges to get output from their clinical system into EHRs, we can apply the Access system to any medical device or clinical application that prints,” said Adam Triplett, PC tech at KershawHealth. “We’re not only getting a great deal, but we also can centralize our clinical output management.”

About Access
Hundreds of hospitals worldwide use paperless Access solutions to integrate e-forms, electronic patient signatures and clinical data into EHRs. Access helps improve care, eliminate financial and environmental costs and enhance patient safety and downtime planning initiatives. Learn more at http://www.accessefm.com and discover how you can help Access’s partner The Last Well bring fresh water & the Gospel to Liberia here.

About National Health Information Technology Week
Now in its eighth year, National Health IT Week is a collaborative forum assembling key healthcare constituents—vendors, provider organizations, payers, pharmaceutical/biotech companies, government agencies, industry/professional associations, research foundations, and consumer protection groups— working together to elevate national attention to the necessity of advancing health IT. Log onto http://www.healthitweek.org for more information.

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