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Client Profile: Sansum
 Cyberlab Helps Clinic Improve Patient Safety, Care Delivery and the Bottom Line Challenge Already recognized as one of the top healthcare organizations within its community, Sansum-Santa Barbara Medical Foundation Clinic continually searches for ways to maintain its leadership by improving patient safety and increasing the efficiency of care delivery. Solution CyberLAB® 7.0, Aspyra's browser-based laboratory information system (LIS) that is designed for multi-specialty clinics and hospitals with multiple performing locations. Results By using CyberLAB, Sansum has generated additional revenue by increasing the number of billed out lab tests and reduced write-offs due to lost charges and poor documentation. Advanced resulting and reporting capabilities facilitate disease management programs and improve the timeliness of alerts for potentially life-threatening conditions. Sansum-Santa Barbara Medical Foundation Clinic has more than 130 staff physicians practicing more than 30 specialties at its clinics and branch offices from Carpinteria to Lompoc. The non-profit Sansum-Santa Barbara Medical Foundation Clinic (Sansum) is the result of an October 1998 merger between Sansum Medical Clinic (an Aspyra customer since 1996) and Santa Barbara Medical Foundation Clinic (an Aspyra customer since 1990). Combined, the Sansum - Santa Barbara laboratory performs more than 2 million lab tests every year. Sansum recently earned a "Highest in the Region" grade in a care delivery report card published by California's Office of the Patient Advocate. The report card grade is a testament to Sansum's ongoing quest to leverage technology in ways to improve care delivery. Sansum upgraded from the character-based system to the browserbased version of CyberLAB 7.0 in April 2004. "Within six days after we began the LIS upgrade, our users were fully trained on the new system. We did not have any productivity losses, report distribution was not disrupted, and 130 physicians were accessing the system from their offices," said Ann Tozier, CLS, Sansum's LIS administrator. "CyberLAB 7.0 has a lower total cost of ownership because the workstations only need a browser to access the system," said Ellie Krock, Sansum's director of laboratory services. "And, by using Aspyra's WebGateway solution with CyberLAB, clinicians within the clinic or remote locations can securely access lab results by simply using a Web browser, which has significantly reduced our lab's call volume for results checking." Sansum also takes advantage of Aspyra's flexible clinical report distribution module, defining rules to automatically distribute reports based on a variety of parameters including client, location and time of day. The laboratory continues to improve patient care and provide quality service to its physicians with immediate notification of critical and changed or amended results at the time of resulting. The call activity is internally logged within the patient's record for historical tracking. The CyberLAB management reporting capabilities found within the SQLGateway enabled Sansum to make an immediate financial impact by running reports to detect bills lacking proper documentation, such as missing ICD-9 codes. This information is efficiently detected with the generated management report and is promptly corrected to avoid lost charges and write-offs. "In addition, the reporting tools also enable us to track high-risk patients by diagnosis or by the medications that they are using," Krock said. "This is particularly useful for tracking diabetic patients, or running reports to analyze all patients having positive hemoccult results, which may indicate a cancerous condition. These tools greatly help us with the disease management and detection, which in turn improves patient safety and enhances our care delivery." Sansum is now in the process of integrating CyberLAB with its IDX electronic medical records solution so laboratory results are automatically entered into the patient record. Additional Aspyra modules that Sansum plans to add in the future include Aspyra's Document Delivery System (DDS) for customized report formatting and distribution, as well as the CyberLAB Point of Care Testing Module, which provides simultaneous order and result capture for samples collected and performed at the bedside or for waived tests performed at remote locations. More Profiles | Top Copyright © 2006 Aspyra. All rights reserved. Privacy & Legal |
