San Francisco , California July 29, 2008
CoSign® digital signature solution is implemented by the South Carolina Department of Mental Health (SCDMH). With help from the leading digital signature (standard electronic signature)company, ARX (Algorithmic Research), the comprehensive mental healthcare provider is advancing medical processes by moving toward a paperless office.
More than 9,500 forms are generated to document the hundreds of medical procedures that are being performed each day throughout the 17 SCDMH medical facilities. These forms require signatures from both the healthcare professionals and their patients. Previous to the deployment of CoSign's digital signature solution, each form was printed out and signed by hand. As such, the SCDMH workflow was paper heavy and required the physical archiving of hundreds of thousands of documents each year. The processes' extensive costs in paper and time led the organization to implement an Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system and the CoSign's digital signature solution, in order to expedite the workflow and complete their paperless cycle.
According to Rick Widdifield, Project Manager at SCDMH, "The vast amount of paper reduction the CoSign digital solution brought about can't be overstated in terms of how it advanced our workflow. As we move to implement CoSign at all 17 facilities, we expect to eliminate printing more than 2,850,000 documents each year."
Implementing the EMR system and
CoSign's digital signature solution at all of the SCDMH locations will eliminate the printing and signing of close to 10,000 documents each day. In the four healthcare facilities currently using CoSign, the migration to a paperless workflow has reduced the processing time by days. Paper-related expenses have been reduced by thousands of dollars. In conjunction with the implementation of CoSign, the organization has also employed numerous "point of service" signing pad locations. These locations allow patients to
electronically sign documents, which healthcare employees can then verify with their own digital signatures, further alleviating SCDMH from having to reintroduce paper documents into the workflow for signing purposes.
"SCDMH's implementation of CoSign emphasizes the marketplace's increasing recognition of the benefits that the CoSign digital signature solution offers, including accelerated workflow processes and reduced workloads," said Rodd Schlerf, Sales Manager at ARX. Rodd added, "SCDMH's deployment also conveys the flexibility of the CoSign’s digital signature solution by highlighting its capacity to easily incorporate third-party elements using a signing pad."
