Customer Insights

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Catawba Valley Health System Shares Tips for Success

Multi-Solution Strategy Streamlines Care and Saves Time, Paper, and Money

Catawba Valley

  • Hickory, NC
  • Community Hospital
  • MEDITECH
  • 258 beds

Challenges

  • Wasted paper and time
  • Inefficient referrals
  • Streamlining patient admissions
  • Locating scanned Business Office documents
  • Converting legacy data

Results

  • Automated faxing and report distribution (inbound and outbound)
  • Streamlined admissions with MEDITECH Bed Board and Bed Stat
  • OCR search capabilities
  • Saving over $14,000/month in support fees from legacy vendor
Catawba Valley Health System (CVHS) is the largest not-for-profit, community hospital in its region. A recipient of numerous awards, including North Carolina’s first and only 5-time Magnet recipient for nursing excellence, CVHS has relied on Forward Advantage for integrated solutions with its MEDITECH EHR for nearly two decades. CVHS implemented Communication Director for on-demand faxing and report distribution in 2003 and has since deployed several other services and solutions, including: Forward Advantage is thankful for the opportunity to reconnect with this valued customer to explore how Communication Director has evolved at CVHS and how our solutions help meet organizational objectives for this award-winning site.

Catawba Valley Insights

gender-neutral-user

Kim Patrick

IT MANAGER

CVHS has an excellent relationship with Forward Advantage. I have many avenues of communication including the support line, regional sales representative, and directors. I have personally met many Forward Advantage team members and feel I have a great working relationship with each of them. Forward Advantage has provided CVHS with a variety of solutions and has been flexible in fine tuning these according to our needs. We have also worked with Forward Advantage to test new solutions to improve their offerings for all customers.
We have many Forward Advantage products, including: Communication Director, RapidFiler, Bed Stat and Find-It. Communication Director provides a vital role at CVHS. This solution automates faxing to our providers for the seamless transition of care. We also use DesktopFax in several areas for on-demand faxing out of MEDITECH. Bed Stat is vital to the organization as well by keeping the MEDITECH Bed Board bed status current. We use MEDITECH’s Bed Board for placing patients in beds and have eliminated many phone calls with a more streamlined admission process.

Our Business Services department uses Find-it to locate scanned documents that would otherwise be extremely difficult to find. We just finished implementing the first phase of RapidFiler and are looking forward to leaner workflows in our Health Information Management department.

We have inbound and outbound faxing.  We also use File Copy and SMTP Email. We use DesktopFax and SmartRoutes for automated faxing. DesktopFax cuts paper usage and eliminates the need for a fax machine. We have four SmartRoutes in use.  We use one of the SmartRoutes to create alerts from orders. We send a patient order to a virtual printer, and the printer sends the order to a SmartRoute. The SmartRoute then converts the order to an email on a mobile device that our clinicians can monitor as they are on the move. This eliminates the need to log into MEDITECH or wait for paper requisitions. It is very beneficial for employees who are on the move but need to know what their next order is. We also use a SmartRoute to send purchase orders through MEDITECH to our vendors. This saves valuable time for our Supply Chain department.

We have eliminated paper faxing in several areas in the hospital by using Inbound Faxing and File Copy to network folders. Referrals are received much faster and we’re wasting less paper and time.

The System Activity Monitor is useful when investigating complaints of providers not getting results.  We can find exactly when the results were sent and to which fax number. It is also useful for monitoring and resolving “unknown” fax recipients as well as failed faxes.

Providers from other facilities used to have to log in to retrieve AS-OBGYN superbills, but now these are auto-faxed to them. Inbound faxing with File Copy benefits the entire hospital by getting data into MEDITECH faster.  

A couple of years ago, CVHS approached Forward Advantage with a problem regarding legacy data.  Forward Advantage worked with us to get that data out of the legacy system and into MEDITECH. It was a long process, but the team at Forward Advantage was excellent. We successfully migrated many years of legal medical records into MEDITECH and used the Historical Archive Viewer while we were in transition from the legacy system. Due to the successful migration of our legal records from the legacy system, we are currently saving over $14,000 per month in support fees from the legacy vendor.

We have also documented lean processes due to our MEDITECH Bed Board implementation. We have better patient flow from our Emergency Department to inpatient beds and have reduced phone calls to our staff. We couldn’t use the Bed Board if it wasn’t being updated by Forward Advantage’s Bed Stat.

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Communication Director

Learn about enterprise-wide information exchange and faxing  

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Document Imaging & Scanning Conversion (DISC)

CVHS is just one of many customers to use our migration services.

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