Paperless patient accounting: fact or fantasy?

Hospital staff at Morton Plant Hospital in Clearwater, Florida, were "drowning in a sea of paper." The 715-bed facility (the fifth largest hospital in the state of Florida) was producing an average of 19,000 patient bills per month and the patient accounts department was "going down for the third time." Over 50,000 active files covered over 170,000 square feet of shelf space. Eight file clerks spent over 750 hours each month retrieving and filing the department's documents. Warehouse storage space costs were high, customer satisfaction was low, and misplaced files were causing reimbursement delays. (It could take weeks to recover or rebuild a missing file, resulting in patient dissatisfaction and poor reimbursement follow-up.)