St. Michael’s Hospital: Health Records management

St Michael’s Hospital (SMH), located in Toronto, is a world-renowned academic health sciences center affiliated with the University of Toronto.  In addition to being a teaching hospital, SMH leads the way in clinical care, education and research in heart disease, trauma and critical care, neurosurgery, arthritis and osteoporosis, keyhole surgery, diabetes, cancer care and care of the homeless and vulnerable populations in the inner city. SMH is also the designated adult trauma center for downtown Toronto and a major referral center for the province of Ontario.

The Challenge
In 2003, SMH launched Gemini, a large, multi-year initiative to transform how care is delivered to patients, including transitioning the hospital from using paper-based patient charts to an Electronic Patient Record (EPR).

However, recognizing that moving to an EPR is not an instantaneous transition and that paper records will still play a role in patient information management for several years to come, SMH needed to find a document management system that could bridge the paper and electronic worlds. The system would need to be integrated with the health system’s clinical information system (CIS) so that physicians could view content from the document management system without having to log into a separate application. Further, SMH hoped this streamlined approach to records management would address space and accessibility issues in its Health Records Department.

How CGI Helped
CGI implemented Sovera® Health Information Management, a document management system that provided SMH with online storage and easy retrieval of patient health records that complemented patient records housed in the health system’s CIS

The Results
As soon as the new Sovera document management system went live, SMH began seeing substantial clinical and administrative benefits, including:

• Patient records consolidated into a single, online record that can be quickly and easily accessed by authorized clinicians, risk and records management personnel.
• Eliminated need for the Health Records Department (HRD) to retain paper copies of new patient records.
• Redeployment of HRD staff to other areas of the hospital, resulting in considerable reduction in ongoing costs.

The bottom line: Easy retrieval of patient health records available any time, any where.