With the big push to implement EHRs and EMRs, and meet meaningful use criteria in 2011, many hospitals are deploying enterprise content management (ECM) applications to augment their electronic patient records.

While this is currently the most visible use of ECM applications, it should not be the only use by hospitals. The economic downturn has pummeled hospitals and the stalled recovery promises more hard times. Hospitals need to view their health IT initiatives strategically. Health IT initiatives should be leveraged for future needs and across the enterprise.

This is the beauty of ECM. According to a Healthcare IT News survey, more than 36 percent of respondents said they have two or more ECM applications within their organization. In the counterpart Healthcare Finance News survey, nearly 46 percent have two or more ECM applications.

In the Healthcare IT News survey, 77.1 percent of respondents have an ECM application deployed in their health information management (HIM) department, 47.8 percent have one in patient registration, 44.5 percent have one in patient financial services, 41.6 percent in accounts payable and 40 percent in clinical departments. In the Healthcare Finance News survey, 72.3 percent have one in the HIM department, 50.6 percent in patient registration, 42.2 in patient financial services, 36.1 in accounts payable and 34.9 in clinical departments.

Clearly, there is a need for ECM applications across an enterprise. Rather than have multiple applications in multiple departments, hospitals can be more resource and cost efficient if they had one solution across the enterprise. One solution means clinical and financial data can be integrated. That's one of the Holy Grails of computerized patient data.

The Healthcare IT News survey also revealed that hospitals with ECM applications aren't fully optimizing their solutions' capabilities. Respondents said that 74.3 percent can access lab results from their EMRs, 68.6 percent retrieve radiology reports, 64.1 percent access physician and nurse notes, 55.5 percent retrieve EKG results, 51.8 percent access patient consent forms and 43.3 percent can look up insurance cards.

Those numbers should be higher because ECM applications enable EMRs to present these data. Furthermore, only 10.6 percent retrieve retinal eye scans and 5.7 percent access surgical videos. Once hospitals make these valuable data available to their physicians, expect a spike in usage. For example, Cleveland Clinic tracks the access of data scanned by its ECM application into its EMR. More than 40 percent of all documents scanned into the EMR are instantly retrieved, said Dan Slates, director of Integrated Enterprise Applications. "We know that utilization is very high," he said.

In this current economic environment, it makes sense to leverage your health IT investments. Forward-thinking hospitals are doing just that. While many originally implemented their ECM applications for clinical use, their vision is to expand usage to other departments.

Cleveland Clinic's next step is to expand its ECM across the enterprise, from clinical to administrative. SSM Health Care in St. Louis, MO, is looking at revenue cycle and patient accounting needs for its ECM application. Bayonne Medical Center in New Jersey will be deploying its application in human resources, accounts payable and materials management, among other departments.

It makes sense all the way around to deploy one enterprise-wide application across clinical and business areas and to fully utilize all its functionalities. Hospitals take care of patients, but they have to be sustainable. Leveraging versatile health IT applications like ECM is a smart business and clinical move.