Healthcare/Insurance

Total eMed

Problem:
Total eMed, founded in 1998, is a leading provider of transcription services for physicians in the outpatient market. They understand that physicians must focus their attention on patient care rather than administrative demands. Each time a patient is cared for at a hospital, clinic, or physician's office, a dictation and transcription process takes place. After a patient has been examined, his/her doctor's notes are turned into a typed medical record with his/her name on it, which becomes the patient's medical file. Developing these reports, transporting the dictations to the transcriptionists and returning the records to the point of care is a tedious and outdated process.

The Process:

• The physician dictates his notes onto a cassette tape, a digital or analog dictation.
• The notes are sent to a transcriptionist, either on-site or off.
• The notes are typed into a word processing program.
• The file has now become a medical record and a hard copy is sent back via fax or mail to the physician for sign off.

Solution:
Total eMed selected the CareFlow|Net Transcription Suite (CTS) to allow its employees to work remotely and create electronic patient files. IONA's CORBA-based Orbix is the core middleware for the CTS, making possible the secure integration of the different IT systems that hosts the health records. OrbixWeb allows health records and associated information to be stored as objects anywhere on the network, and enables seamless access to those records by any permitted user regardless of their location or the technology they are using.

The product supports the workflow involved in capturing, managing, routing and signing clinical documents using Internet technologies. CORBA healthcare standards and Internet technologies are thus leveraged to enable real-time information exchange and collaboration between diverse healthcare providers. CTS also uses a virtual private network, secured servers and encryption technology to maintain the highest level of security.

Since Total eMed's transcriptionists used a word processing program to complete documents before the introduction of the CTS, there was little need for training on the new system. The expanded application offers transcriptionists the ability to use a template so that much of the report can be automatically created for transcriptionists, thus saving time in the overall process. It also offers the transcriptionist and the service the ability to monitor performance and rate the individual. "There were many special processes built into the application. We chose the CareFlow|Net Suite because they could wrap all of our needs into the process using object capabilities," said Alexander Poston Jr., senior vice president and chief information officer at Total eMed.

There are over 80 reports that can be run through CTS. This allows Total eMed to track information such as document completion time, document start time and date, and employee productivity on the Internet.

Once the preliminary document is complete, Total eMed can use various routing methods to efficiently and securely deliver the results back to the physician. The preliminary documents can be returned via fax, emailed, Internet (Web based) or directly printed via network printers. Because Total eMed works with so many outpatient clinics and doctors, CORBA was used to easily adapt the solution to each individual customer's needs. "The hospitals decide exactly what they want and how they want the documents to be sent, and the solutions are configured for them," said V. "Juggy" Jagannathan, CTO, CareFlow|Net.

By utilizing the CTS system, physicians who work with Total eMed are able to access the preliminary document easier and faster than ever before. Now there is the capability for physicians to sign-off on documents on-line. "The entire design concept is centered around providing physicians enhanced benefits & services securely without having to change the physicians work processes. We took an old, manual-process and recreated it using state-of-the-art-software and the Internet to provide Total eMed's enhanced services," said Poston.