SEATTLE – Dealing with the inevitable paper components of a digital electronic medical record often represents a significant hit on productivity and restrains the full return possible with digital information.
As such, managing all types of content in an electronic environment plays a big role in optimizing the use of an electronic system and keeping the staff that uses it productive.
To improve its management of non-digital information, Swedish Medical Center in Seattle is deploying a software suite to handle that content.
The goal involved more than just digitizing content, said Nancy Richards, content and document system architect for the facility.
“We need a comprehensive content management system that provides support for document and image capture and management, as well as workflow,” she said.
Swedish Medical selected the Oracle enterprise content management suite, to be deployed in support of the rollout of its electronic medical record from the Epic Systems Corp., which began in February 2007.
The registration/ADT module of the Epic system captures information into the Oracle content management system for use throughout the duration of a patient’s encounter with the healthcare system.
“To achieve a truly electronic medical record, we had to encompass signed documents that would be included with the patient chart,” Richards said. “Other types of information, such as EKGs or something from another system, could be imported or scanned into the content management system, where someone could retrieve it under only one log-in.”
The new EMR system is accelerating the creation and management of patient records, necessitating the need for more efficiency in accessing information.
For example, one clinic had a basic patient records management system that required about a dozen steps to pull information from faxes, attribute it to a specific patient and incorporate the data into the patient’s record. The Oracle software needs only four steps to complete the process.
The content system has other side benefits as well, Richards said. For example, it was used to help assemble and produce training manuals for 500 users. Previous approaches would have necessitated help from six staff members working over four days. Creating the manuals with the Oracle content management system took only one administrative staffer about half a day, she said.