ECM Bridges EHR Gaps

By Ken Congdon, editor in chief, Health IT Outcomes

EHRs are quickly becoming the clinical lifeblood of hospitals, private practices, and other healthcare facilities. These systems have evolved over the years to facilitate electronic data entry, access, and exchange. A key step in the transition from the medical file folders of yesteryear to the EHR age is the ability to electronically capture and store paper documents, and associate these images with the appropriate patient records in the EHR system. To streamline this process, many EHR vendors embed document imaging and management applications into their software platforms. While these embedded document management features often offer advantages in terms of convenience and EHR integration, they are also often limited in their abilities to meet the document management needs of the entire healthcare enterprise. For this reason, it can be inefficient, and even dangerous, to rely on the document management capabilities of an EHR alone. Health IT Outcomes recently had the opportunity to speak with Dan Teske, Perceptive Software's manager of sales engineering for healthcare to gain a greater understanding of how your healthcare facility may be able to benefit from the successful implementation of an ECM (enterprise content management) system.

Q: What are some advantages of leveraging a horizontal ECM solution as opposed to relying on the document management capabilities of an EHR?

Teske: One of the key advantages of leveraging an enterprise-wide content management solution is that these systems are designed to serve a variety of different industries — not just healthcare, and not just EHRs. Therefore, these "horizontal" systems generally deliver a broader level of functionality because they need to meet the requirements of so many different departments and users.

The horizontal design of ECM solutions also allows a single system to be leveraged by several departments within a healthcare facility. For example, not only can an ECM system help feed paper documents into the EHR, but it can also be leveraged in departments such as patient registration, finance, HR, and others. This attribute is appealing to many healthcare CIOs and CFOs because the organization only needs to invest in one document management product instead of potentially having to invest in several products to fulfill the needs of multiple departments. Access This Content To Read This Article In Its Entirety.