211 - Innovative ROI Solutions and Automation Efficiencies: Banner Health's Success

The tremendous strides hospitals have taken to adopt innovative solutions have vastly improved the patient experience, but with these developments comes a push to increase patients’ accessibility to their medical records. This new standard is hitting an already fragile hospital workforce. Many health systems do not have the infrastructure to support the influx of medical record requests. Banner Health experienced this problem and desperately needed a modernized logging platform to increase compliance with patients’ right of access and staff efficiencies.

The speakers will demonstrate how they built a process to modernize their electronic medical record request process based on measurable results, outcomes, and practical lessons learned. Adoption of new technology and enhanced internal workflows has significantly improved staff efficiency, reporting capabilities, and the patient experience.

Banner Health’s journey to modernize its request process began with an antiquated, homegrown process of network folders to organize requests electronically. All requests were assigned to a team and then transferred to an individual for manual processing, which made prioritizing, tracking, and reporting extremely difficult. This discussion walks the audience through the entire process of partner evaluation and selection, documentation of internal processes, implementation, training, and addressing workforce challenges.

The speakers reveal lessons learned when considering an electronic request technology, including the benefits of identifying a technology partner that offers extensive product training, assistance with evaluating current workflows, road mapping add-on functionality, and workforce configuration recommendations. Alignment with the right technology partner is critical. In this session, attendees receive Banner Health’s list of questions asked during the partner selection process.

Banner Health’s primary motivation for adopting new technology was to harness the capability to streamline and automate manual processes, saving time and valuable resources. The ability to access the real-time status of a request for records was critical and forced Banner’s team to evaluate their entire request workflow and the workforce needed to support it. The speakers will walk through the step-by-step process required to assess the extensive request requirements and different processes from each facility within the network supported by Banner Health. They needed to identify the gaps in the patient’s right of access requirements, compliance, and tracking and reporting shortfalls.

Throughout this process, efficiencies were identified, and staff reassignments were made to serve other priorities within the department. Since the adoption of the new technology, Banner has been able to reallocate full time employees, while gaining the capacity to expand the volume of work for locations previously unsupported by their centralized release of information team. The speakers discuss staff reactions, attrition concerns, initial hesitations, and buy-in challenges to demonstrate how Banner Health was able to alleviate workforce roadblocks, streamline workflows, and build a stronger, more efficient team.

To address the challenges of a strained workforce and the expansion of strenuous regulation and compliance requirements, teams are forced to find solutions that automate manual processes. This session is designed to debunk misconceptions about automated solutions and innovation, thereby enabling better predictions, overall efficiencies within the health information management department, and improved patient satisfaction.