BACKUP AUDITING

THE SITUATION
ABC Medical Transcriptions is a consultancy that offers medical records transcribers (inputing information into digital records from hand-written and other sources - electronic medical records will be required of all medical service providers by federal law no later than 2014). ABC provides transcription services in their own facilities (where clients ship their hard documents or document images) as well as consultants and temporaries to work at client offices. ABC has a complete quality-assurance program in place, including electronic copies of both original source and digital output documents, peer and supervisory review, and a client acceptance procedure. However, these measures tend to be document-, client-, or patient-centric rather than oriented to the employees performing the work.

When an employee is doing dull, repetitive work, mistakes are inevitable. In the medical field, such errors have the potential to be very costly. Because of ABC's record retention policies, it is easy for ABC to can affirm whether or not an inputting error occurred by comparing source and output documents. This may answer an immediate legal question but not address prevention or mitigation of future problems. Unfortunately, the same quality assurance policies that improve accuracy by having documents reviewed by several employees makes it difficult to track which employee was responsible for a specific error, what procedures may have contributed to it, or variables which cause changes in error rates. It is not easy to see where efficiencies might be gained or which quality assurance policies produce better results.

CURRENT TECHNOLOGY
ABC utilizes the accepted protocols and procedures, and meets or exceeds all standards applicable to its roles and responsibilities.

THE VIEWSENDER SOLUTION
viewSender is not a recorder, and so does not capture information on a document-by-document basis. It does, however, capture patterns of behavior specific to a computer user or work station, and can therefore report the series of activities occurring on one or more computers related to a time period or unique text (such as the UPC code or other ID related to a output document). When a problem is identified, the passage of an image or text containing a unique identifier can be tracked as it makes its way through an organization. Therefore, viewSender as a backup auditing and primary cause analysis tool for detecting the patterns, individuals and environments that contribute to an event (for correction, procedural analysis, or efficiency/efficacy research).

This can have unexpected benefits. Prior to deploying viewSender, ABC hired their transcriptionists as hourly employees, punching a time-clock and having assigned work-times and set break periods in shifts. ABC had a long-term contract with a major hospital chain, and noted that error rates for documents processed during certain time spans of the day were higher. When they looked at sequences of images captured by viewSender during the times in question, the problem became obvious. When the employee's assigned break time arrived, the employee would stop whatever he or she was doing immediately, even when in the middle of processing a document. Upon returning from break, the employee would pick up from where they assumed they left off, and this was the point at which they were most likely to make errors. By changing their policies a little regarding document completion and making break times more flexible, ABC was able to reduce the overall error rate, creating a win-win outcome for everyone.