Shandra Jenkins
EMS Billing Manager
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Escambia Department of Public Safety, located in the Florida Panhandle, serves over 300,000 residents in Escambia County. With a fleet of over 35 advanced life support quick response vehicles, the department is responsible for the processing, storage, and management of all medical transport paperwork in the area, including medical and billing record requests from patients, doctors, attorneys, and other government agencies.
The Escambia County Public Safety’s medical record department was facing a significant challenge regarding the processing, storage, and retrieval of the extensive hard-copy records generated by the County’s daily ambulance transports.
The department handles approximately 150 to 175 ambulance transports a day, each generating multiple pages of medical records and other documentation that needed to be manually collated, checked, de-stapled and scanned.
The Department received between 5 and 20 requests a day, each of which needed to be handled within a particular time frame for the Department to remain legally compliant. The sheer amount of time it took to collate multiple transport record requests was putting significant strain on employees. An entire workday could be spent flipping through hundreds of pages of documentation in the physical file rooms, looking for a single patient’s transport records. Misfiling or incorrect document datings were commonplace, and the records were at significant risk of loss or damage from natural disasters or degradation.
In order to meet compliance requirements, the department often had to pay additional overtime to employees to complete record request backlogs, incurring significant costs.
Escambia County Public Safety needed a better solution, sothey reached out to Image API for help.
Over a period of just six months, Image API worked closely with the Escambia County team to securely image and digitize over 400 boxes (over 1 million pages) of existing confidential ambulance transport medical and billing records through a full-service digitization solution, effectively clearing out two file rooms, which could now be put to better use.
In addition to expert digitization services, Image API deployed its industry-leading content management system, Axiom Pro, to index Escambia County Public Safety’s ambulance transport records into a searchable database, making them effortlessly retrievable by day of transport or patient name, and securing them with permissions-based access to protect patients’ private information, in keeping with HIPAA compliance specifications.
After implementing Image API’s full-service digitization and content management solution, Escambia County Public Safety was able to cut retrieval and collation time for multiple-transport record requests down from a whole working day to just 10 minutes. Single record requests have been cut down from as much as an hour of searching to under approximately ten minutes per request. Now, records management staff are able to complete multiple records requests in a day, and the department no longer incurs overtime costs to remain compliant with required request fulfillment timelines.
Furthermore, digitizing the department’s medical billing records archive freed up two additional rooms for much-needed office space.
The retrieval efficiency delivered by Axiom Pro means patients can get their records while they wait. Escambia County Public Safety is now able to serve citizens more effectively and efficiently than ever before.
Let’s discuss your digital transformation options! Reach out for a no-obligation discussion with one of our Image API solutions experts now. We’ll help you determine whether Axiom Pro® is the best solution for your state or local government’s content management needs.
