Hospital prescription: A healthy dose of content management
The Report & Output Management Suite also acts as an archiving tool. "We now have eight years of reports and can easily restore [the data] for any user who wants to compare numbers over any period of time," he says.
The admissions and laboratory departments on the clinical side of the organization also have started using the solution as report repositories.
"One thing we see in this industry is an overwhelming volume of paper," says Therese Harris, program manager for life sciences at Open Text. "But you aren’t going to get a whole view of the patient with paper in the mix. The real leaders in the field are finding ways to get everything clinical that was on paper into electronic form and viewable from within their EMR system."
ECM in the cloud
A relatively new approach to enterprise content management in healthcare is software as a service (SaaS). HealthCare ConsultLink, a Texas-based company that provides healthcare consultants for a variety of services, including in-home hospice treatment, has begun storing documents "in the cloud" using a service provided by SpringCM.
Home healthcare consultants and visiting nurses providing personal assistance and hospice care in rural locations can chart their patient visits and then upload them to SpringCM to be indexed. SpringCM also serves as a central repository for policies and procedure manuals.
"We are seeing interest from hospitals or other medical service providers where there is a distributed work force that needs access to content in the field, or mobile workers who need to file content from the field," says Jeff Piper, SpringCM’s VP, professional services and partner enablement.|
The Visiting Nurse Association of Central Jersey is also using a solution powered by SpringCM to streamline its document capture, management and workflow process. SpringCM
CEO Dan Carmel says his company is "rethinking" ECM. "What we do is focus on delivering enterprise class content management in a pure SaaS model," he explains. "We have hospital and medical lab clients, but we also are partnering with domain experts in various fields that can build purpose-specific solutions based on our SaaS platform."