An averaged size hospital typically provides care for thousands of patients a year and typically each patient receives a paper chart when they visit the hospital, producing thousands of records annually that must be physically stored and manually maintained. This process is time-consuming, costly, and can leave patient information and records vulnerable to security threats. Physically storing records is not only costly, but it takes away valuable space that could be used for patient care.

The University Of Illinois Medical Center At Chicago is one of the nation’s premier teaching hospitals and sees thousands of patients per year. The Patient Accounts department is very busy as it processes a variety of financial billing and insurance documents for their patients. Over the years, the physical record storage began overflowing its space and it was only getting worse. Staff had to navigate through thousands of physical documents making it hard to find the right document when responding to information requests. Department staff decided it was time to implement a system to securely manage patient information electronically so they could rid themselves of this time-consuming tedious task.

Medical records staff worked with Digitech Systems reseller, Datamation, to build an electronic solution. They chose to implement PaperFlow^™ to automatically route scanned records into ImageSilo^®, a cloud-based document management system, to manage their medical records electronically. After implementation, staff was trained in less than a week. Staff to was also able to decrease document retrieval times, eliminate costly physical storage, and enable HIPAA compliance with extensive audit trails.