Reproductive Medicine Associates of New Jersey Chooses eBridge Solutions’ Document Management to Better Manage Patient Records

Tampa, FL, July 01, 2010 --(PR.com)-- Reproductive Medicine Associates of New Jersey (RMANJ) – with offices in Englewood, Morristown, Somerset, Summit and West Orange – has chosen eBridge Solutions’ web-based document management system for storing their patient records.

RMANJ knew it would be a challenge to get their office staff to become paperless, but something needed to be done. Between patient charts, physician’s documents and accounting papers, RMANJ had tons of paperwork that needed to be organized, filed and stored — preferably somewhere where retrieval would be easy.

And, if a patient switched offices, their charts needed to be transferred from one location to another. With multiple offices and a large, off-site storage facility, there was nothing easy about the way they were currently retrieving their documents.

“If we don’t see a patient for more than a year, we archive their charts at our off-site facility,” Brooke Bonser, RMANJ database systems support and analyst specialist said. “If that patient returns, we have to physically go to the storage site and retrieve their chart. And, of course, we can’t just retrieve one file. It is typically a box of files that we need to manually sort through to find what we need.”

Brooke heard about a possible solution to her paperwork issues from the Atlanta Center of Reproductive Medicine (ACRM): a web-based document management system from eBridge Solutions.

“I was excited to learn about eBridge for a few reasons,” Brooke said. “The first was that ACRM seemed to benefit tremendously by adding eBridge Solutions and the second was that eBridge was already integrated with the reproductive endocrinology patient management system we use called RESource.” RMANJ’s developers were able to use eBridge’s Web Services to create a single-sign on process that lets staff sign into eBridge and RESource with one login.

Initially, RMANJ’s staff was apprehensive about the amount of extra time it would take them to scan in new documents and get a handle of how the eBridge system works. That apprehension was short-lived, however, when they discovered how quick and easy the scanning and retrieving process really was.

The physicians were also skeptical about the transition from paper to electronic records. The teams at RMANJ did something very smart and for a patient’s first consultation, the staff provides the doctor with a full paper chart. After the consult, the paper is scanned into eBridge and the chart goes paperless — giving everyone time to adjust to the new technology.

RMANJ hasn’t started to scan any records housed in their off-site storage facility yet, but they use eBridge to scan in new and current patient paperwork.

“We decided not to go back and start scanning in archived documents,” Paul Bergh, MD explained. “Instead, we are going forward and scanning in new patient paperwork or new test results and files our current patients receive.”

RMANJ has also been able to implement eBridge into other parts of the office, including the finance and administrative departments. “We like eBridge because it meets our needs and is a simple process,” Brooke said. “It keeps us from having to add to our existing file cabinets and we know our scanned documents are stored securely online.”

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