Leading-Edge Cancer Clinic Accelerates and Improves Patient Care with ABBYY Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)

With over 100 projects underway at any time, and with service to nearly 60,000 patients every year, Chris O’Brien Lifehouse is one of Australia’s leading cancer treatment and research facilities. ABBYY IDP has helped it eliminate 80 percent of paper records to accelerate and improve access to critical patient information.

For every patient registering with Chris O’Brien Lifehouse, staff created a physical folder that needed to be present at every single appointment and inpatient stay. All paperwork was completed on hard copy and was saved in the physical medical record.

With cancer patients there for 90 days or more, paper records quickly piled up. Staff had to track thick physical files around the hospital. Doctors were challenged to find the specific information they needed to meet the clinic’s goal for holistic, integrated care.

To reach its goals for a paperless environment, the organization needed:

• A way to convert a huge backlog of physical documents
• The highest accuracy possible to deliver the highest standard of patient care and quality of research

ABBYY IDP automatically converts large collections of documents for search, long-term retention, collaboration, or additional processing.

The IDP solution is used hospital-wide at Chris O’Brien Lifehouse to process any document still completed in paper form, easily handling the 90 or so different document definitions with AI-powered optical character recognition (OCR) that delivers fast, accurate results.

The organization has been able to fast track its clinical and outpatient appointments by enabling secure, real-time online availability. For cancer patients, that is critical.

• Eliminated 80% of paper records backlog
• $50,000+ saved per year by avoiding paper copies
• Faster access to a patient’s complete medical history means higher quality delivery of care
• Reduced burnout for medical records staff; ability to add value elsewhere