Document Scanning Eases The Workload Of 200,000 Annual Patient Visits

The question facing MercyCare Community Physicians (MCCP) in late 2007 was simply this: What was the best way to handle the huge record-processing workload generated by more than 200,000 patient visits a year? This included record capture, storage, filing, cross-referencing, sharing, and making those medical records instantly accessible.

MMCP is a for-profit affiliate of the award winning Mercy Medical Center, a nonprofit located in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It's more than 85 physicians serve Iowans from 20 community-based facilities located throughout the Medical Center's service area. Though most of the clinics focus primarily on family practice, two are certified trauma centers and several specialize in such areas as internal medicine, endocrinology, pulmonary care and occupational health.

"We needed a system that would make records available on-demand at whatever clinic a patient happened to be in," says MCCP EHR Data Analyst Kevin Hockett. "If a regular patient at one of our rural clinics becomes ill and goes to one of our urgent care centers or has an accident and winds up in the Medical Center ER, doctors have to be able to access his charts without waiting for someone to find a file and feed it into a fax machine."

According to Hockett, MCCP equipped all their offices with Panasonic KV-S1025Cs based on Sage's recommendation and have never found a reason to question that call.