While I was being recruited for a position in the Cardiology Division of the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, Texas, Dr Runge, Cardiology Division Chief, indicated that one of my many challenges would be managing the division's patient medical files.

After joining the Cardiology Division in August of 1996 we identified problems with document retrieval, processing, and storage of our Fellow's patient files. In addition to the primary medical records that the Hospital Information System houses, Cardiology maintains specialty specific files on all its patients.

Coincidentally at that time, my husband Bill was consulting to Canon Research Center America (CRA). This Canon R&D group was developing a document server. The CRA PICS document server was Canon's newest document storage and retrieval system. PICS was the first such office system to electronically store true images of office documents and to retrieve them on demand.

Bill introduced Dr. Runge and me to Dr. Harry Garland, Vice President, CRA. Canon and the UTMB Cardiology Division as a result undertook a project to develop a medical records database, the Document Management Platform (DW3) Pilot. With over 5,000 patient files and 1 million pages of data, which occupied 125 square feet, our initial objectives were to scan the documents into the data base, consolidate the files, to more easily manage our document retrieval, and to reduce storage space. As we accomplished our objectives we identified a more important function for the system, namely: patient records accessibility via the internet. Our Cardiology Fellows can now access their patient files conveniently and quickly from on-site and off-site locations.

Two recently delivered papers/presentations, of which I coauthored, regarding the make up of this DW3 system and the success it has achieved at UTMB, follow. The first presentation is "A New System of Computerized Patient Records", and the second is "The Web Browser as a Unifying Agent for Radiology and Health Care Enterprise".

Without any doubt the Division of Cardiology has brought its patient records keeping into the electronic age. Canon's expertise, products, and goodwill has allowed us to greatly improve our patient document handling, storage, and retrieval and this has afforded us significant productivity gains and potentially large cost savings.

Carol S. Evans
Administrative Director Cardiovascular Services
Cardiology Division
University of Texas Medical Branch
Galveston, Texas.

Contributing UTMB author.

(UPDATE: Carol Carol has been in cardiovascular healthcare management for over 30 years and is with Duke University. Carol can be reached at carol@tkprojects.com.

The Canon/UTMB development program has recently facilitated a significant step in electronic patient charts with the Cardiology Department's Fellows now exclusively using the web-accessible electronic charts, thus allowing the phasing out of the hard copy departmental patient chart.

Dr. Harry Garland is now at Garland Actuarial Consulting and can reached at harry@garlandactuarial.com. Dr. Jerry May is consulting and can reached at geraldmay@prodigy.net.)