Case Study: Sentara Healthcare achieves 97% of documents in patient records within 5 minutes and $2.5M in cost savings with Hyland’s OnBase Express Scanning

Organization achieves 83% faster EHR access to medical records converted from paper

Sentara Healthcare, a large not-for-profit health system serving Virginia and North Carolina, faced a major challenge in processing vast amounts of unstructured clinical and administrative paper across hundreds of sites and 12 hospitals. Their legacy scanning tool was unreliable, failed to tag or trace document origins, and often did not deliver records into Epic or OnBase quickly enough to support timely care and billing (Sentara aimed to import documents within 30 minutes; HIMSS Stage 7 requires 24 hours).

Partnering with Hyland, Sentara implemented OnBase Express Scanning with centralized and local configurations, simple icon-driven document/descriptor selection, barcode indexing and direct integration into Epic. Deployed to roughly 650–700 locations, the solution achieved indexing in 0.28 seconds, placed 97% of documents into patient records within five minutes (an 83% improvement), streamlined workflows across multiple departments, supported a 40 TB cloud migration with zero human errors, and produced projected cost savings and avoidance of over $2.5 million.

Sentara Healthcare

Tara Neitzel

IT Operations Manager