jshepherd Posted January 4 Share Posted January 4 Has anyone found software that can help them digitize all the paperwork (antigrams, instrument printouts, etc) for patient antibodies? I have a HUGE file cabinet full of these things, and we'd like to make it electronic, but of course it has to be searchable by name and/or MRN and we would need access to it during downtimes. I'm thinking a third party software out there must have this capability by now....it is 2024 after all! We have Softbank and Epic, and I'm aware that Soft has this capability, but it will cost us upwards of $20K to complete the project, and no one has that just laying around these days. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Solution Cliff Posted January 4 Solution Share Posted January 4 This is a tough one. In a former position, I created an intranet that had many functions. One we added was document storage. For many years, we stored tens of thousands of documents, and it worked very well for us. It saved us a tremendous amount of money as we no longer sent new documents offsite. We also retrieved many documents and either destroyed them or scanned them. We decided to move our reference files online. There are probably close to 40 or 50 thousand records online now. A file might be one simple anagram, or it might be a multi-volume hundred-page scan. We tied the record to the LIS, so it did a look-up of the patient info. The documents were all scanned locally and took up many hundreds of gigabytes. It would be not easy to make this information both secure and backed up offsite AND available onsite during a downtime. We had downtime reports we would rely on and decided to forgo having the actual workup available. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RRay Posted April 15 Share Posted April 15 We currently use OnBase for this. Fortunately, my facility was trying to keep transcriptionists in a job so they have been reassigned as scanners. They've been able to scan and load all of our indefinite keep items and they link to epic encounters. The only downfall was that pre-Epic workups had to be scanned into a shared drive type file because they could not be linked in OnBase. Let me know if you have any questions regarding this and I can find out. It is backed up routinely and is read-only for those allowed access. You do need an audit system in place to be compliant with AABB, so we put one in place and I added it to the SOP. At another facility I helped us go full digital, not even paper antigrams. It was a bit more messy tho because it utilized a shared drive. OnBase feels more secure and tamper proof. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jshepherd Posted April 15 Author Share Posted April 15 We ended up making our own solution, similar to Cliff's post. We created a program that allowed us to use a normal scanner to create a file in our shared network drive. Each patient has one folder, and within the folder are the different antibody workups, labeled by date of workup. It was a manual process to scan them all in, but one of my techs completed it in her downtime in about 2 months. It's only 1100 patients, but many have multiple workups per file. The shared network drive is backed up routinely, and we were told would be one of the earlier things to be granted offline access in an extended downtime. I am now impatiently awaiting the day I feel comfortable to get rid of all the paper that has been scanned in.....and then figure out what to do with that giant file cabinet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cgotwo01 Posted April 16 Share Posted April 16 We also have Soft/Epic. We recently began to scan the ABID panel sheets into Epic as lab view only. If you open Specimen Inquiry using the lab specimen number, go to Result Entry, then deselect everything except Antibody Identification, you can either add a scan or upload a document. Not sure how much of this is standard in Epic or is part of our unique build. We also considered Soft media, but could not justify the cost when Epic will allow the upload of a scan. I hope that is helpful! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
applejw Posted April 16 Share Posted April 16 This scanning into Epic sounded intriguing.... I don't think it is unique to your build. Are you scanning in all of the paper generated during an antibody investigation or do you have an algorithm that you follow? We send large volumes of patient workups to be stored off-site forever and have multiple file cabinets for the most recent 2-3 years worth of records. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sgoertzen Posted April 17 Share Posted April 17 We have WellSky and Epic and we scan everything and attach it to the patient in WellSky so it becomes a part of the patient's viewable blood bank testing history. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RRay Posted April 18 Share Posted April 18 On 4/16/2024 at 11:41 AM, applejw said: This scanning into Epic sounded intriguing.... I don't think it is unique to your build. Are you scanning in all of the paper generated during an antibody investigation or do you have an algorithm that you follow? We send large volumes of patient workups to be stored off-site forever and have multiple file cabinets for the most recent 2-3 years worth of records. This can be done in Media Manager and scanned as a lab result. We do this for signed uncrossmatched product forms and off-site transfer tracking and you can attach it to transfuse/prepare and test orders. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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