At PureSafety, we measure our success by the success of our customers. That’s why we highly value the experiences our customers share with us, which explain how OHM empowers them to create measurable time reductions, improved workflow and increased productivity.

Read the full story on Carolinas Healthcare System below — and be sure to read our other Customer Success Stories as well. You’ll see firsthand how our results-driven solutions work in different environments and empower professionals in all areas of health and safety. Then explore the rest of our website, including the informative, engaging product demonstrations and course samples in our Demo Center. We also invite you to contact us Toll-Free at 800.733.8774 or via email.

		Testimonial “OHM helped us transition from manual recordkeeping to an electronic medical record. The database and easy-to-use tools have improved organization and reduced workplace stress, while ensuring that we provide the best information to customers.” Lydia Crutchfield Director of Employee Health

Carolinas Healthcare System (CHS) is the largest healthcare system in the Carolinas, and the third largest non-profit public healthcare system in the nation. CHS owns, leases or manages 29 hospitals in North and South Carolina and employs more than 1,400 physicians practicing in more than 500 care locations. CHS also operates rehabilitation hospitals, nursing homes, ambulatory surgery centers, home health agencies, radiation therapy centers and physical therapy facilities. Together, these operations comprise more than 6,000 licensed beds and employ more than 44,000 full-time or part-time employees.

The CHS Employee Health Department is responsible for more than 27,000 employees and approximately 75,000 total employee records. It operates three daily fully operational clinics, and two others that are available on specific days and times. It runs or plays a key role in many critical programs, including medical surveillance, blood borne pathogens exposure management, infectious diseases management, drug screening, return-to-work, back injury prevention, hearing conservation, and more. The department also performs health assessments for potential hires.

Before implementing OHM, much of the department’s tracking, recordkeeping and reporting was done manually. The size of the organization and the number of separate locations and departments required stacks and stacks of forms for many critical programs. Beyond consuming significant resources, the manual approach also meant slow turnaround times and potential for human error throughout the process.

CHS wanted to automate medical surveillance tracking, simplify reporting and ultimately give Employee Health Department staff the best possible tools to do their jobs efficiently and effectively. But other variables had to be considered as well, including cost and the inevitable challenges of implementation, training and upgrades when dealing with large organizations.

OHM had all the capabilities CHS was looking for — and more. Additionally, OHM’s longevity, and the fact that it was already in use by many large and similarly complex organizations, gave CHS confidence that they would get the implementation and related support they needed. Return on investment factors also contributed to the decision, including the tremendous savings in staff time and physical resources involved with moving from a manual system to an electronic medical record.

According to CHS OHM Specialist Debbie Grieneisen, OHM was also attractive because it was very user-friendly and smartly designed to streamline workflow. “There is very little data entry duplication,” she explains. “If we give a vaccine and enter it as an encounter, that data automatically populates the vaccination tracker records. Wherever we work in the system, data populates related areas, and it’s very easy to run a range of reports.”

Another appealing feature was OHM’s ability to generate truly random lists for drug screening. “There are ways to get a random list manually, but they have drawbacks — they’re time-consuming, they aren’t ‘random’ enough, and so on,” Grieneisen says. “Being able to generate truly random lists with a mouse click made OHM a big hit.”

Nearly a decade after implementation, the company continues to find new ways that OHM can empower staff — such as the Batch Assignment feature Grieneisen learned about at a PureSafety Knowledge Exchange. “Sometimes in medical surveillance we need to track people who are in different jobs and different locations — they have nothing in common except that we need to keep track of them,” she says. “The OHM Batch Assignment feature allows you to enter such people into a user-defined group, then track and manage them all at once. That functionality is a wonderful addition, and it’s a good example of how PureSafety is always thinking ahead and making OHM responsive to real workplace challenges.”

OHM has been used by the CHS Employee Health Department since 1998, primarily by nurses, HR assistants and clerks, as well as IS administrators. CHS Director of Employee Health Lydia Crutchfield, RN, BSN, says the transition to an electronic medical record has led to greater efficiency and organization, reduced workplace stress, and better information for the managers served by her department. OHM has delivered:

Front-Line Benefits — Crutchfield and Grieneisen say that the power of OHM is experienced most directly in its impact on specific programs:

• Vaccination Marathon — Batch Entry, an OHM feature regularly used for vaccinations and TB, combined with electronic forms, helped drive the phenomenal success of a flu vaccination campaign. At the clinic, each employee logged onto the system to pull up their record, while the nurse pulled up another electronic record; both records then fed into OHM. Instead of stacks and stacks of forms that had to be entered into the system later, all data was entered in real-time. Estimated time saved? Three months of work!
• TB Skin Test Surveillance — Before OHM, this process could take a week of man-hours just to print forms, stuff envelopes and distribute. With the automation of this process, staff now print forms any time they’re needed, and can easily track and create a list of employees who are due or overdue. OHM has also made it easier to send this important information to department managers, or place it in a queue they can check at their convenience.
• Health Assessment — OHM has enhanced the department’s ability to ensure that CHS doesn’t hire anyone who lacks the required vaccinations/immunizations or is otherwise unsuited for a job.

Bottom-Line Benefits — OHM has helped drive cost savings and improved business performance in key areas:

• Efficiency — OHM has greatly reduced the time required for tasks like tracking, recordkeeping and reporting, cutting costs while freeing up staff to work on other workplace health initiatives.
• Risk Management — Timely distribution of information to managers and employees via OHM has helped improve efforts to limit exposure and maintain employee health. As a result, CHS has fewer lost work days and related expenses.
• Compliance — By helping the company maintain and document compliance, OHM helps CHS avoid potential fines from OSHA and other regulatory agencies.

Reporting and Communication Benefits — OHM’s automated reporting has been a big time-saver for staff, but other communication improvements have been noted as well:

• Accountability and Visibility — The ability to easily pull and distribute vaccination and similar information for a specific area has enabled managers to be proactive, while also improving individual and organization-wide awareness of key health issues.
• Decision-Making — Lydia Crutchfield says OHM’s tracking and information-sharing features help her and her staff deliver the timely, accurate data senior managers need for decisions. “We track compliance rates, obviously, but I’ve also tracked the number of exams we give, which helped justify hiring additional staff,” she explains. “OHM has been an eye-opener for senior management. One manager wanted to know every employee who had a flu vaccination. I was able to provide her exactly what she wanted. Then she distributed the list to department heads in her facility so they could work to increase their compliance.”
• Seamless Integration — OHM interfaces with other internal databases and systems at CHS, including PeopleSoft, simplifying data transfer between different job functions and facilities.

Data Integrity and Maintenance Benefits — Automating and electronically storing data has reduced the potential for human error or data loss.