American Hospital accesses patient records quickly and securely with PaperWork

American Hospital (Amerikan Hastanesi), one of Türkiye's leading healthcare institutions, has extended its pioneering position to digital archiving and records management. With the PaperWork document management solution, the hospital achieved significant gains across the organization.

For the first time in Türkiye, a hospital's patient files were digitized and electronically archived and managed with PaperWork software. American Hospital achieved major savings in both cost and labor, and the time lost in accessing patient files was eliminated. GGSoft delivered this challenging project on a turnkey basis, providing American Hospital with both service bureau services and the software solution.

"We saw that GGSoft could successfully handle this challenging project."

Gül Ünnü, Medical Records Manager at American Hospital, explained that the hospital is a large institution operating in many specialties and generating a very large number of patient files. She described how they started the RTRIAL project in 2006 and why they chose PaperWork: "Medical records are critical documents for the healthcare provided to the patient; they contain the health information generated during examination, care and treatment. This information is created from the patient's admission to discharge and keeps growing. When patients return, physicians and other healthcare staff first need the patient files to learn the past medical history. For these reasons, multiple users need to access the same patient file at the same time while keeping patient information confidential. Archiving medical records and delivering them to the relevant staff on time requires a lot of labor and systematic work. A physical archive that keeps expanding is also a major factor that makes this work harder. The need to manage all of these factors in the best possible way, while also preserving the physical archive, led us to this project. Before the project, we met with many companies. We wanted the company doing the scanning and data entry to be reliable and experienced, because given the size of the physical archive and the variety of medical records, this was not an easy job."

Ünnü noted that they began working with GGSoft through Koç Sistem and saw that GGSoft could do this job best. She said they found GGSoft to be a corporate and reliable company that understood their expectations and requests well. Ünnü also highlighted the importance of GGSoft being a local company they could stay in constant contact with. She said they worked closely with the GGSoft team throughout the project and that the difficult process of "digitizing the physical archive," which took nearly three years, succeeded thanks to a spirit of teamwork.

"Patient files can be accessed quickly and securely in a very short time."

Describing the benefits of this pioneering project for the hospital, Ünnü said the most fundamental benefit is being able to reach patient files from the digital archive in a very short time. She noted that thanks to PaperWork, only authorized staff can access patient files within confidentiality rules, and that the software's authorization features are sufficient in terms of security. She continued: "We can see who looked at which page, when, and from which computer. We are now able to store the patient files in our physical archive outside the hospital. We can also access patient files at different locations such as the Zekeriyaköy Family Medicine Center and Medamerikan. We now have the chance to store information indefinitely. We got rid of photocopying costs. When the project ended in 2009, we had reached 1 million scanned documents and 1 million 300 thousand index entries. Today the number of documents has reached 20 million and the number of index entries 2 million 200 thousand. Managing such a large number of documents in a physical archive would be very difficult. We can now classify documents, and producing statistics on medical records has become simpler. If we were not using PaperWork software, we would have had to double the number of archive staff. Besides the labor savings, we achieved much better results in terms of employee satisfaction. We can see that satisfaction has increased among all staff involved in the patient file circulation process, including our physicians, nurses, archive staff, medical secretaries and patient representatives. Naturally, since all of these positive developments help us serve our patients better, they have also had a positive effect on patient satisfaction, which is our core goal."

"Our doctors embracing the project is a sign of its success."

Ender Yörük, Software Manager in Information Technology at American Hospital, explained that the service bureau part of the project ended in 2009 and that daily scanning and indexing of files has since been carried out by the hospital's Medical Records department staff. He said 5-6 thousand pages are scanned per day, and that they know very well the GGSoft team will always be there for them if any issue or request arises. Yörük noted that GGSoft has always offered the right solutions and actions at the right time, and that since American Hospital keeps growing, the number of pages scanned daily will continue to increase; the system has the capacity to handle this growth. Stressing that one reason for the project's success was that physicians embraced it and showed minimal resistance throughout, Yörük said: "Our doctors can access the digital archive and see all of a patient's medical records. The system has made accessing medical records much easier. This was one of the project's success criteria: if we can convince our doctors to use a system, that project has succeeded. We saw the least resistance possible during this project, because our doctors saw the benefits of PaperWork firsthand. In fact, it has become the system our doctors use most during the day. Of course, all of our healthcare staff can use the system; we have 800 users, and 200 users can connect at the same time." Yörük, who considers PaperWork user-friendly as well as flexible and open to development, emphasized that they want to keep working with PaperWork on future projects and will continue to maintain their leading position in the Turkish healthcare sector with PaperWork's support.

Ali Gözen, PaperWork System Support Manager, said: "PaperWork's open integration architecture has shortened the time required for many tasks. Patient information pulled from the hospital information system via web services can easily be used within PaperWork. With the LDAP integration, login control for 800 users is managed through the hospital's central LDAP server. PaperWork's DjVu compression technology has halved the storage space taken up by scanned documents. CAS technology has also shortened the backup time for 20,000,000 documents."

"American Hospital fully embraced the project."

Seval Okur, Professional Services Manager at GGSoft, underlined the role of American Hospital's management and team in the project's success, saying the hospital gave the project strong support and truly took ownership of it. "They never gave up, even at the hardest stages. This project at American Hospital is a true document management project. It succeeded in every respect: service bureau, software and support. For GGsoft, this project increased our expertise in healthcare. I can say we learned a lot from this project, and we are still learning," Okur said.