Case Studies - Integrity Integration Solutions

IIS Customer: AlloSource (Tissue Banking Industry)

 

AlloSource is one of the largest, most respected tissue banks in the United States. Founded in 1994 on a promise to honor and respect the gift of donation by responsibly developing, processing and distributing life-saving and life-enhancing allografts for their communities.

 

The Challenge

 

AlloSource needed an efficient solution to store and maintain donor medical records, along with a consistent evaluation process that could stand up under the riggers of an FDA audit. Previously, evaluating donor tissues for eligibility by the Medical Records department at AlloSource required information from a number of disparate systems. Each piece of the data puzzle was collected manually and assembled by Medical Records staff. In a majority of the cases, a full review was conducted instead of a focused tissue review. The inability to gather information from a cohesive source resulted in inefficient eligibility reviews and jeopardized time critical decisions. A more efficient process was proposed to integrate data from the donor receiving application, labs, ERP and medical records review systems. AlloSource saw an opportunity to achieve greater efficiencies and data quality by integrating the systems.

 

The Solution

 

The solution integrated AlloSource's data islands into a single interconnected system creating a single cohesive application to manage the process of evaluating donor medical records. The new system was designed to give users insight into every aspect of the donor evaluation process. On one screen the medical records staff can view documents uploaded by agencies, internal documents, InfoPath forms, communication logs, active tasks and access to a very detailed Donor Dashboard. The integration enables visibility to tissues that have been received and produced, which can be utilized to initiate specific tissue review workflows. This in contrast is more efficient than the all or nothing approach previously implemented.

 

The Result

 

Significant efficiency improvements were achieved by eliminating unnecessary tissue reviews, centralized access to all donor data and a simplified interface minimizing disruptions to the evaluation process. Manual data entry was reduced and higher quality data was collected for the donors received from the agencies utilizing the EDI interface. All of these improvements impacted the average days to disposition a donor, which historically has taken about 7.4 days to currently 2.45 days or a 300% increase in efficiency. In the first month, AlloSource has been able to break a record, clearing more than 2X charts than ever before. In addition to the quality and performance improvements, the redesign also reduced data storage by 64% and almost half a Terabyte after converting nearly two million documents from a TIF format to the industry standard PDF.