One of Turkiye’s leading health institutions, the American Hospital, has also shown its pioneering position in the field of digital archiving and management. With the PaperWork BPM document management solution, the hospital was able to achieve very significant gains within the hospital.

For the first time in Turkiye, by transferring patient files to the digital environment and archiving and managing them electronically with PaperWork BPM software, the American Hospital was able to make significant savings in both cost and labour, while eliminating time losses in accessing patient files. PaperWork BPM provided the American Hospital with service bureau services and software solutions in this challenging project, realising a turnkey project.

“We have seen that PaperWork BPM can successfully handle this challenging project.”

Gül Ünnü, the American Hospital Medical Registrar, explained that Amerikan Hospital is a large hospital, running in many areas of expertise, with many patient records, and that they started the RTRIAL project in 2006 and the reasons they chose PaperWork BPM software as follows: “Medical records are critical documents for the health services provided to the patient; they contain health information generated during the patient’s examination, care and treatment processes, from the patient’s entry to his exit from the hospital. This information is generated during repeated visits, and the doctors and other health professionals will need to access the patient records to learn about the past medical information. For these reasons, multiple users need to access the same patient record at the same time, while ensuring the privacy of the patient information. Archiving medical records and delivering them to the relevant personnel in a timely manner requires a lot of work and systematic work. A constantly expanding physical archive is an important factor that makes the work harder. The need to manage this factor in the best way, while protecting the physical archive, directed us to this project. Before the project, we talked to many software companies. We wanted the company that would do the screening and data entry to be a reliable and an expert one. Because this application is not an easy job due to the size of the physical archive and the variety of medical records.”

Ünnü indicated that they had started working with PaperWork BPM with the referral of Koç Sistem and seen that PaperWork BPM could be the best to do the project . She also pointed out that PaperWork BPM was a reliable company with the corporate structure, and that they had noticed that their expectations and requests had been well understood. Ünnü emphasised the importance of PaperWork BPM being able to maintain constant communication and said that they had been in collaboration with the PaperWork BPM team throughout the project. Success had been achieved by carrying out a difficult process such as “transferring the physical archive to a digital environment” over a period of nearly three years with a team working approach.

“Patient files can be accessed quickly and safely in a very short time.”

At the end of this pioneering project, conducted in their hospitals, Ünnü described the benefits to the hospitals, saying that the most basic benefit they saw was being able to access patient files from a digital archive in a very short time. With Paperwork BPM, they are able to access patient files from different locations such as Zekeriyaköy Family Medicine Center and Medamerikan in compliance with privacy regulations, and they noted that the authorization part of the program was also sufficient in terms of security. Ünnü continued his words as follows: “We can see who looked at which page, when, from which computer. We are able to archive patient files outside the hospital from our physical archive. We have the chance to save information indefinitely. We have saved from photocopying costs. When the project ended in 2009, we had reached 1 million scanned documents and 1 million 300 thousand index numbers. Now the number of documents has reached 20 million and the number of indexes has reached 2 million 200 thousand. It would be very difficult to manage such a high number of documents in a physical archive. We can now classify documents. We have made it easier to make statistics related to medical records. If we were not using the Paperwork BPM software, we would have doubled the number of archive staff. We have saved in terms of labor force, and we have obtained much more positive results in terms of employee satisfaction. We can observe that the satisfaction of all our employees involved in the patient file circulation process, such as our physicians, nurses, archivists, medical secretaries, and patient representatives, has increased. Naturally, all these positive developments have positively affected our main goal, patient satisfaction, and enabled us to provide better service to our patients.”

“The fact that our doctors own the project is an indicator of the success of the project.”

The American Hospital Information Technology Software Manager, Ender Yörük, who explained that the service bureau of the project ended in 2009 and the daily files were scanned and indexed by the Hospital Medical Records Department staff, said that 5-6 thousand pages were scanned per day and that they very well know that if there is a problem or requests, the PaperWork BPM team will always be by their side. Yörük, who pointed out that they have always seen the right solutions and moves from PaperWork BPM at the right moments, also stated that the American Hospital is constantly growing and that the number of pages scanned daily will increase constantly and that the system is of sufficient capacity to meet this growth. Yörük, who underlined that one of the reasons for the success of the project is that the doctors took part in the project and showed the least resistance during the project, said the following regarding this matter: “Our doctors can see all the medical records of the patient by accessing the digital archive. The system provided a great convenience for access to medical records. This was also one of the criteria for the project to be successful; if we were able to convince our doctors to use a system, then that project was successful. We saw the least resistance possible during this project, because our doctors saw the benefits of Paperwork first hand. So much so that it became the system our doctors used the most during the day. Of course, all our health personnel can use the system, we have 800 users, and 200 users can connect at the same time.” Yörük, who thinks that Paperwork BPM is user friendly and has an open structure for development and flexibility, said that they would also like to work with Paperwork for future projects, and that they will always continue their pioneering positions in the health sector in Turkiye with the support of Paperwork BPM.

Ali Gözen, Paperwork BPM System Support Manager, said, “Paperwork BPM’s open integration structure has shortened the duration of many processes. Patient information pulled from hospital automation systems and web services can easily be used in Paperwork BPM.

With the LDAP integration, 800 users were able to have their access to the system managed centrally from the hospital’s LDAP server.

The DJVU compression technology used by Paperwork BPM has halved the space taken up by scanned documents in the system. The CAS technology has also shortened the time it takes to back up 20 million documents.”

“The American Hospital has fully embraced the project.”

PaperWork BPM Professional Services Manager Seval Okur highlighted the role of the American Hospital administration and team in the success of the project, stating that American Hospital provided great support to the project and took it very seriously. Okur said, “They did not give up even in the most difficult stages. This project at American Hospital is a real document management project. It has achieved success in all aspects, both in the service office, software and support. This project has increased our expertise in the healthcare field for PaperWork BPM. I can say that we learned a lot from this project. And we are still learning.”