A Little Holistic Thinking Toward ECM Will Take Hospital A Long Way

By KeyMark, Inc.

Enterprise Content Management vendors have worked in vertical markets such as banking and insurance where the days of simple scanned document storage are long behind us. In those verticals, business process management, workflow and B2B solutions rule the day. On the contrary, in most hospitals and physician clinics the scanning and electronic storage of the paper documents are the core need. Once scanned though, the real value comes from the availability of those scanned paper documents integrated through the EMR user interface allowing physicians the ability to get a holistic view of a patient’s medical record – past and present – without the need to search multiple sources to do it.

With EMR integration the focus, using industry standard messaging formats such as HL7 and XML allows document management vendors and systems integrators the opportunity to provide integrations beyond traditional screen scraping or screen context interfaces. Using these standards, truly embedded document links are available to physicians giving them a longitudinal medical record for each patient at their fingertips utilizing the EMR screens and interface they are already familiar with. In fact, in many cases, physicians accessing scanned documents from the document management system will be retrieved the same way they retrieve a transcription document or electronic lab result.