Fertility clinic goes paperless, reduces human error

HAMILTON, Ont. – The HART (Hamilton Assisted Reproductive Technologies) Fertility Centre has been providing fertility, obstetrics and gynecological services to patients in the Hamilton Niagara Region since 2001. The clinic has a team of 10 medical and administrative staff, and serves roughly 30 to 40 patients per day from Monday to Saturday.

Patients regularly have bloodwork, ultrasound and other diagnostic testing such as MRI to help determine a diagnosis. In 2006, the centre was looking to implement new clinical software to increase efficiencies and step away from manual processes.

“When I started, we were already in the process of switching systems and in the end we settled on Oscar Service – more recently known as Trinity,” said Damaris Culibrk, office manager at HART (www.hartfertility.ca). The solution is said to be user-friendly, simplifies the OHIP billing process and allowed the clinic to go paperless.

“It really saves us time and money in our daily processes, and is more tailored to a specialty clinic,” said Culibrk. Previously, when bloodwork results came in by fax, results were entered manually into a patient’s chart, a task that took a long time to complete. With Trinity, all the results are uploaded into a patient’s medical chart automatically.

Trinity was originally designed for family practices, but has recently expanded into much more. They’ve developed some innovative solutions that increase user efficiency, and have enabled HART to provide better care for its patients.

For example, Trinity integrated a PACS system by creating a direct link to the images in a patient’s chart. “Previously, a doctor would have to log into a different program to view the image, so this is a convenient solution that saves the physician time,” said Culibrk.

Trinity collaborated with software developer CompuArt, to integrate their lab solution into the HART clinic, eliminating human error and improving efficiency. “Prior to the integration, we would hand write a patient’s name on the blood tubes and then enter the names manually into the lab instrument. When the results were finally ready, we again entered them manually into the patient chart. This method was time-consuming, and had a higher margin of human error,” said Culibrk.

“But now, a patient’s demographics are automatically sent from Trinity to the CompuArt software and a label is printed with a unique barcode identifier. Our lab equipment then reads that code on the blood tube and sends the results back and into the patient’s medical chart, thus eliminating human error and increasing our efficiency. We are extremely happy with this solution.”

Trinity is currently working on streamlining the HART clinic’s billing process, eliminating all manual entry.

Trinity electronically receives reports from the different community labs (e.g. Gamma, Lifelabs) and uploads them directly into the patient’s chart. No filing, scanning or uploading is required.

Other unique features include: Special Resources – Trinity links automatically to special resources such as schedule benefits, and patient health card check to verify validity of the card. Not having to key in test results and data manually has eliminated errors from keying in illegible paper work.

Audit trail – Clinicians can see which files were accessed by whom, when they were accessed and what changes were made. Depending on the user, there are different privileges. For example, only someone with administrative privileges has access to administrative features like billing, adding or deleting users, password changes, etc. This ensures the protection of a patient’s privacy.

All patient charts are fully encrypted, and physicians with medical privileges can view a patient’s medical record from outside the clinic from anywhere by logging into a secure portal.

As for training, the HART Clinic was already familiar with Oscar Service so it wasn’t a difficult transition for staff when it became Trinity. “The add-ons were simple to understand, and although we’ve done some minor tweaking of the software for our individual needs, Trinity is definitely user-friendly and simple to use,” said Culibrk.