Enterprise Content Management System Benefits for Healthcare
One tool that has the potential to ease workforce strain is an enterprise content management system. Adding features such as smart data capture to an existing healthcare IT system can reduce the amount of time administrative staff members spend scanning and faxing. The tool can also feed documents from other systems to aggregate materials. When coupled with a broader ECM system, users can receive content in near real time, improving efficiencies for both clinical and nonclinical staff and reducing time spent following up or cross-checking documents.
As the shift to electronic health records broadens, some interfaces can become incompatible with others. Many health systems may be using a variety of platforms to manage the large amounts of information each patient needs. ECM can help close gaps by serving as the content connector for systems that might not be able to merge with a patient’s electronic health record.
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Systems integration also improves accessibility, allowing users to stay within their primary system for respective workflows. By automatically uniting documents in a single interface, health systems can interact with different content in one place via a simple hyperlink. For example, clinicians can interact with scanned documents that appear in a patient’s chart while those documents are also available for others to view and act on.
A dynamic document interface can also be used for content sources that remain in a silo. In one instance, a large Canadian health system utilizing this strategy for vitals monitoring and other disconnected data was able to save an estimated 500-plus hours for nursing staff — and 1,500-plus hours for administrative staff — over one year.
Finally, these tools can also enable automated content management, removing manual steps such as scanning, and freeing time for other tasks administrative staff may have. By using these features to help manage content, health systems can improve their workflows. What may seem like a small start can ultimately set up the system for success.
Tips for Health Systems on Implementing an ECM
First, to ensure a solution best addresses the unique challenges a health system might face, leadership should survey its functions and identify the biggest stressors for staff. By observing workflows and flagging manual tasks, leaders can watch for clues that indicate certain features may need to be upgraded.
When implementing these tools and processes, it’s important to plan for long-term success. Monitoring and evaluating how well these tools are (or aren’t) working is critical to ensuring adoption by the hospital team. Being realistic about the current state of an organization and focusing on moving forward is critical. Leaders should consider ways to keep the conversation going among employees to understand how new processes affect their day-to-day experience. Surveys and other creative methods of capturing feedback can be effective in learning how employees feel about new solutions.
As stress continues to mount across the entire healthcare ecosystem, clinical staff and nonclinical workers are reporting exhaustion, negativity and ineffectiveness at record-high levels, reports the World Health Organization. With subsets of health workers conveying intent to leave their jobs due to work overload, solutions like ECM are needed now more than ever to address and eliminate these problems, quickly and effectively.
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