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Health care professionals deal with an abundance of paperwork every day—including admission and discharge forms, insurance forms and patient records. Health care workers also have to be able to send these forms out and store important documents as well.
In an attempt to help workers better manage these tasks, Omtool announced Feb. 26 that it will offer its Omtool Healthcare Suite, a set of software products based on the integration of Omtool and BlueChip Technologies document lifecycle technologies. Omtool acquired Blue Chip in January 2007.
Omtools Healthcare Suite includes an ADT (admission, discharge, transfer) eForms production system, which provides hospitals with electronic forms for patient registration and identification such as ID bracelets or patient identification labels.
The Healthcare Suite also offers the eForms station, an electronic forms library that enables health care workers to access their hospitals electronic and printable forms.
“A hospital is very paper-intensive when it comes to medical records and data and from admission through discharge, as health care providers must carefully manage an array of complex forms, patient documents and charts, verification data and much more,” said Karen Cummings, executive vice president of marketing for Andover, Mass.-based Omtool.
The health care platform from Omtool also features the Image-In Point of Service context system, which lets users scan images of clinical and non-clinical documents such as insurance cards, drivers licenses, referrals from scanners, cameras, signature pads, fax files and previews them before storing the information.
To convert paper-based documents to electronic records, health care workers can use the Healthcare Suites Image-In Business document capture and archive system while also featuring an Image-In Clinical back-office scanning system, which allows health care workers to capture patient medical records files after the patient has been discharged.
Healthcare Suites Image-In Queue document processing allows health care administrators to manage, view and send out electronic documents to specified departments or patient files. ObjectiveArchive is an electronic archive system that allows health care professionals to store information designed, developed and captured through any of the Omtool Healthcare Suite applications.
The Healthcare Suite from Omtool also includes its AccuRoute document routing software, a document hub that will give health care workers points of connectivity within their medical office for both paper and electronic documents and will also enable users to use multi-function devices such as a digital copier or printer to scan, fax, store, send, receive and archive important medical and patient documents.
“The Suite eliminates redundant and wasteful forms and processes, improves productivity through electronic forms, improves the patient experience, increases patient safety, strengthens confidentiality and accelerates the revenue/reimbursement cycle,” Cummings said.
Xerox, a partner of Omtool, believes that the main benefit of the Healthcare Suite is that it improves the flow of information.
“With Omtools solution, patients have fewer forms to complete as information can be automatically populated into new forms and if a patient is transferred from the emergency department to another department, their initial admission forms are centrally available,” Roger Ellefson, manager of solutions marketing of the Stamford, Conn.-based Xerox, told eWEEK.
The Omtool Healthcare Suite is currently available, and organizations should contact Omtool for suite pricing information.
In other Omtool news, Omtool announced Feb. 15 that it will offer AccuRoute on Hewlett-Packards MFPs (multi-function printers).
For businesses that send documents via fax machine on a daily basis, there are some major privacy hurdles to overcome. The inherent security risks with fax transmissions pose a problem when trying to comply with federal security and privacy regulations.
“Our customers have been trying to take paper-based workflows and transfer them over to electronic-based workflows because industry regulations such as HIPAA [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act] and financial industry regulations do not allow businesses to fax certain identification, insurance and financial information due to the fact that the medium is insecure,” said David Laing, partner business development manager for Hewlett-Packard.
AccuRoute automatically distributes content in multiple formats and can be sent to several locations, allowing business professionals to access their important documents.
AccuRoute also includes directives that allow users to specify the documents route, enabling users to define their own process and distribution rules from their desktop or a scanning device.