Overview

Gaston Memorial Hospital is a not-for-profit general and acute care facility serving Gaston and surrounding counties in North Carolina. It offers 442 licensed beds and features all private rooms. Gaston Memorial Hospital provides a variety of specialty services including emergency services, neurosciences, psychiatric, surgical services, cardiology, orthopedics, women and children services, and more.

Challenge

Gaston Memorial Hospital needed a way to improve the efficiency of important administrative functions within the hospital. Its manual processes were time consuming, required vast amounts of paper and relied on interoffice 'snail mail'. This method was unreliable and lacked a means for tracking employee responsibility and accountability. The hospital often faced problems of lost paperwork, lost time, no reporting mechanism, and no visibility into the status or history of a process.

Take for example its Job Posting process. The hospital processes an average of 100 to 150 job postings per month and requires a series of management approvals prior to posting. Because it was paper-based, its approval time became lengthy and it was also virtually impossible to determine why the process was delayed. The process owners became extremely frustrated as it became more difficult to monitor if the forms had been sitting on someone's desk or lost in transit.

The hospital recognized its administrative processes were inadequate and set out to find an automated means to process documents faster and more efficiently ; ultimately helping people process work more productively and creating an accountable, efficient environment. Moreover, the hospital also wanted to find a technology that would integrate with its existing infrastructure and be flexible enough to not only handle its many Human Resources processes but one that could potentially be leveraged throughout the entire organization. To help drive and manage its critical business processes, Gaston Memorial Hospital turned to Business Process Management (BPM) software from Metastorm.

Solution

Gaston Memorial Hospital turned to Metastorm BPM to facilitate its transition to an automated organization. The goal was to resolve the out-of-control paperwork problem and interoffice mail routing procedure by placing the hospital's processes under the control of Metastorm BPM. After a competitive review, Metastorm met the hospital's key requirements which included the ability to integrate with its existing Novell GroupWise electronic mail application, the ability to provide Web-based accessibility for its users, and the functionality to empower the hospital to easily and quickly automate endless applications; thus allowing them to be more efficient, have greater control and increase accountability.

The hospital was amazed by how easy it was to automate and deploy its processes and has already automated over 15 processes using Metastorm BPM resulting in significant time and cost savings. Processes already deployed include human resource processes such as job postings, termination process, new hire process, and personnel action forms, as well as more mission critical processes such as patient incident tracking, financial planning and reporting, equipment charge master tracking, and more. With immediate access to all forms and information, hospital employees are now able to initiate processes by accessing forms displayed in their own GroupWise email client or Web interface. The forms look similar to the paper forms they replaced, and when necessary, alerts or email reminders are sent for immediate action.

Extending the Value to Mission Critical Processes

Seeing how quickly processes could be deployed in Metastorm BPM, the hospital has leveraged the solution to go beyond its original goal of streamlining HR processes. It now uses it to automate and manage its Incident Reporting process; a critical process initiated by nurses to report incidents involving patient care. The form tracks approximately 600 incidents and includes everything from death, wrong medication administered, and hospital acquired infections, to a patient who has fallen out of bed or slipped in the bathroom. As this process is extremely critical to the hospital and has been such a huge success, the hospital considers this to be its "crown jewel" and a critical advantage to the efficiency and agility of its operations.

Prior to being placed online in Metastorm BPM, the incident reporting form was a double-sided, 11x17 piece of paper, with very small print. The form was completed by hand and than sent via interoffice mail to the hospital's Performance Improvement department. This department was responsible for keying the information into an Access database and manually researching the incident and personnel involved.

With its new web-based solution, nurses complete an electronic form that is then routed to appropriate personnel depending on conditions and violations built into the process. The new system also triggers notifications to specific departments involved and to management who can leverage the system to document and track explanations for risk management and audit purposes. Manual keying and research has been eliminated, and Metastorm BPM allows the department to focus on analyzing areas for improvement in the hospital and increasing patient satisfaction rather than taking up valuable time with administrative duties.

Another core process that has been automated in Metastorm BPM is the hospital's Charge Master Tracking process. This process is critical for the hospital to correctly bill a patient or insurance provider for equipment used in surgery. For example, if a certain type screw is used by a doctor in surgery, the hospital has to make sure a charge number is associated with it to be able to recoup the cost of the screw. If not, a process is initiated in Metastorm BPM to request a charge number. The hospital only has 72 hours to obtain the charge number and enter it into the billing system before the billing takes place.

Results

The Metastorm solution is yielding excellent results to date. The hospital has drastically saved money on paper costs, improved access to forms by hospital employees, significantly reduced errors resulting from manual routing issues, and decreased time spent on paper-based administration. The process automation, management and control capabilities that Metastorm BPM provides have also improved overall process and data accuracy and increased employee satisfaction by empowering users with access to information to ensure that work-in-process is accounted for and no longer lost or delayed. All processes are tracked and documented and the hospital now has visibility into historical data for reporting, analysis, and organizational improvement.

Using Metastorm BPM, the hospital’s Job Posting process has gone from weeks to under a day with full cooperation from all approvers. Its employee termination process is now extremely simplistic and managers are submitting termination paperwork in a timely manner rather than weeks after the employee termination. The new process also serves as protection against potential lawsuits since Metastorm BPM provides insight and visibility to personnel managers without the hassle of digging through paper files to back up termination information.

The hospital plans to continue leveraging Metastorm BPM across the organization to automate additional processes. They have already outlined an Educational Roadmap process that will track certifications and licensing for nurses and IT employees. The system will document education progress and notify when the next license or certification is due. Other processes to be deployed include an Applicant Tracking System to track job applications through the Web, a Capital Acquisition process, IS service requests, Facility Service requests, and many others.

Hospital management has endorsed the Metastorm software as a critical system for the organization and expects that it will continue to save the hospital significant time and money as additional processes are automated, managed and controlled with the software. In addition to increased efficiency and greater control, the management team now has real-time visibility into critical information they did not have before, giving them the ability to make the right strategic decisions on how to improve hospital operations.