There's a big push in the healthcare industry for hospitals to deploy core IT systems -- electronic medical records, PACs, practice management, cardiology -- to enable more efficient, higher quality care. Once those systems are in place, the next step is to ensure that as much clinical information is fed into those systems to make them optimally efficient and present a comprehensive view of each patient from a clinical and financial perspective. When you're a hospital or healthcare system that interacts regularly with local physician offices that may not have adopted EHRs yet, the challenge becomes much more complex.
Seattle Children's Hospital was an early adopter of health IT. It also had a grand vision for its core IT systems: Get as much clinical documentation into the systems as possible. The logical solution for Seattle Children's Hospital was to invest in health IT to bridge that paper-electronic world in which so many healthcare organizations reside. An enterprise content management (ECM) application acts as that bridge by taking paper documentation via fax or other means and scanning it into the core IT systems. It is also a forward-looking application in that it accepts outside documentation in electronic form and inputs it into the IT systems. This is what the healthcare system will look like in the near future, but today's ECM application lives in both paper and electronic worlds because it's a reality for the majority of hospitals and healthcare systems today.
In this economic environment, hospitals can ill afford to waste resources and indeed must leverage health IT to be more efficient. According to the American Hospital Association's Rapid Response Survey released in August 2009, 20 percent of hospitals declined to move forward with their IT projects, 21 percent scaled back on projects already in progress and 3 percent stopped projects already in progress. In this kind of environment, it's critical to choose IT initiatives carefully. Projects that can be leveraged not only to solve today's problems but tomorrow's as well, are high value initiatives that won't be scaled back or stopped altogether. This is the value that ECM applications bring.
ECM applications essentially become a core IT system because they connect the rest of the core IT systems. When one document is scanned into a clinical system, someone in another department can securely and with appropriate rights access that document in a practice management system. The information flow is seamless. Not only that, but hospital physicians can access critical documentation wherever they are to deliver real-time, efficient healthcare services at the point of care.
When a health IT application connects IT systems and allows information exchange across the hospital, that application is a core IT system. As Seattle Children's Hospital has shown in its case study, ECM is a core IT system.
