Issue 1 2011 > Case Study: Hospital in France
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Case Study: Hospital in France
The General Hospital of Versailles "Centre Hospitalier de Versailles" has a deep historical significance. It was initially founded by Louis XIV in 1636 as a modest infirmary known as the "House of Charity."
It has been modernized several times throughout the centuries and today it features 800 beds in the main building, as well as three additional buildings including a nursing school and a historical building that was once a general nursery.
As part of the evolution of the hospital's continued efforts to modernize itself, The General Hospital of Versailles was seeking a partner to outsource and digitize their medical files. This would ensure that backup copies would always be on file. Having electronic records stored offsite would ensure the safety, security and integrity of the records.
The hospital also needed to maintain the instant access they were long accustomed to while keeping their records in-house. Their requirement was to digitize and outsource the medical records for all patients who were hospitalized within the past five years.
The Problem
Once the hospital chose Crown Records Management as their records management provider, the transitional and ongoing challenges were identified.
- The existing files of the patients (dating back five years) had to be retrieved and transported to Crown's Poissy Management Center, located in a suburb of Paris, France.
- This represented more than 400,000 existing patient records, about eight kilometers (five miles) of files.
- These existing files were quite old and not as organized as the hospital would have preferred, making it difficult to find the files they needed to care for their patients.
- A process would need to be put in place to manage the outsourcing of about 14,000 new patient files that will be added every year.
- Once the files were outsourced to Crown, they had to be accessible by the doctors and hospital employees 24 hours a day, seven days a week, should there be an emergency that would require the medical files to be reviewed urgently.
The Solution
- Crown implemented a "back file conversion" process to manage the existing files. Following the transport of the files to Crown's facility, each medical record was immediately scanned and digitized upon arrival.
- To ensure that the medical records would be accessible to the hospital staff around-the-clock, and to ensure that the process would be implemented as quickly as possible, Crown utilized the resources it had available from its international network.
Crown's local expert in Paris, Christophe Portal worked closely with Graeme Marshall, from Crown Scotland, who relocated to Poissy on a temporary basis. The team set up the processes and hired a new employee who is solely dedicated to managing the hospital's records.
The new staff member was recruited, trained and "up-and-running" in less than a month. He is now on staff and, along with his local team, is available to serve the hospital's needs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. - For new patient records, each record continues to be scanned immediately upon arrival at Crown's facility. All records are assigned a unique bar code for easy identification and stored safely and securely, with redundant systems in place, to further safeguard these critical patient files.
- For the hard copy records, the files are now completely organized and labeled with the patient details. They can be easily identified and retrieved upon request from the hospital.
- The team now delivers about 20 files per day (4,000 files per year) from its Poissy facility to The General Hospital of Versailles, always before 10 AM.
- For urgent requests, the team delivers files within three hours.