Paperless Office Solution Rescues Ambulance Service

PC World - When the first responders at Georgia-based National EMS go to work, they save lives. They also produce a mountain of paperwork, all of which must be accurately managed and securely stored for a minimum of seven years. The storage of all these documents was a monumental task, requiring the company to use a large warehouse space to store it all. And the labor hours wasted in storing and managing it all, and retrieving documents as needed, was overwhelming the 12-person office staff.

To get all this paperwork under control, National EMS called Computer Troubleshooters NRD. We assessed the company's current infrastructure and came up with a solution that simplifies the process of managing all this documentation while meeting the stringent requirements of the Health Insurance Privacy and Portability Act and other government regulations.

Document Overload

Until they called us, National EMS had been working out of file boxes and large file cabinets. A file room with six vertical file cabinets was used to store files, and every couple of months those cabinets would fill up. At that point, the files would be moved to long-term warehouse storage, where they would sit for seven years. Meanwhile, the company hires couriers to retrieve documents and deliver them between the office and the warehouse.

Also, since the company works with Medicare and Medicaid, they have to make multiple copies of documents for use in multiple files. A few dozen times a day, employees have to pull existing files from storage, which takes about 15 minutes to get up, go to the file room, find the file, pull it, and return to their desk. We calculate that they were wasting the equivalent of two full-time employees pulling files every day.

We came up with a plan to stop all this paper shuffling and simplify the company's workflow, cut labor costs, and improve efficiency.

Smarter Document Management

The first thing we needed to do was eliminate the company's reliance on file cabinets and paper. To digitize all of the paperwork, we installed Kodak double-sided sheet-fed scanners. All billing personnel now have their own scanners at their desks, and two larger Kodak i1220 scanners are now centrally located for common use. Remote workers will have the smaller scanners, as well, and will scan directly to the server remotely.

At the core of our solution, we deployed Cabinet NG, a document management system to help them do away with paper all together while providing a secure, audit-driven system that will allow them to more easily comply with HIPAA and other regulations. We installed a server to handle this load, as the demand on it will be too high for the company's existing server. This new server will also perform the role of terminal server so that remote users can access the system without experiencing any delays.