Every time a new patient sets foot in a doctor's office, a clinic or a hospital, a chart is immediately opened to capture the patient's history and current medical condition. Until now charts have been paper-based and may contain upwards of hundreds of documents. And when you think of the thousands of people passing through a doctor's office or hospital each year, the number of documents is simply mind-boggling.

In today's complex and rapidly changing health environment, managers and providers need to move towards electronic charts. But migrating complex documents, images and other data from a paper-based state to an electronic environment is a large time-consuming initiative. TELUS Health Solutions has a wealth of experience working with leading healthcare organizations throughout North America in establishing health record management strategies that address the needs of clinicians, researchers, managers and health records professionals.

In order to assist our customers in the development and implementation of solutions that meet the requirements of clinicians, while reducing parallel processes, our professional services team engages in the following steps:

• Definition of the client's vision for EHR deployments
• Analysis of the present situation, including an inventory of key forms and charts needed in the clinical decision making process
• Definition of the optimal roadmap leading to successful implementation of the objectives
• Clarification of clinical care workflows and practices during the transition
• Evaluation of risks associated with the transition

The following benefits are estimated prior to the project deployment and measured during its implementation:

• Reduction potential in printing and filing; taking into account the transfer of associated resources to required scanning activities
• Reduction of internal and outside paper storage requirement
• Reduction of record duplications in each unit and associated filing
• Availability of one-stop visualization of the records by health professionals and associated economies of time
• Additional timeliness in access to information; through remote coding and concurrent coding

Through careful planning, it is possible to improve health record chart completion and release of information practices.