Health Informatics Forum

By Kim Phan, Program and Marketing Coordinator, The Institute for Health Technology Transformation (iHT2)

Health care enterprise content management (ECM) is beneficial to the health care industry and is the critical framework behind collection, storage, analytic tracking, reporting, and securing clinical data for electronic health records (EHR).  As we move through the stages of meaningful use, organizations want to make sure that they are implementing, covering, and facing each of the challenges as each health system moves forward.  The meaningful use incentive program has resulted in more physicians implementing EHRs. The benefits of having the best ECM software are improved interoperability, consistent EHR data, and an efficient framework to manage unstructured patient data.

In a recent interview with Search Health IT, Barbara Walters, senior business analyst at the University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers, shares the process switching from IBM’s FileNet to On Base’s integration with Epic for EMC.  Over a ten month period, Walter’s team converted 29 million clinical and revenue documents. They had to break down 22 million clinical images, 9 million revenue cycle images and they also had over 3,500 different document types. Her team wanted to be as specific as possible and their goal was to shrink down to 700 document types, which began by taking all data fields and creating new keywords in OnBase.

According to Walters, they still have daily challenges in the system. She states, “Now, registration, revenue cycle, base applications and Epic ambulatory are converted, with inpatient coming next. But, what’s the best way to do inpatient transitioning? We want to narrow it down based on time sensitivity.…

Video from the UK Department of Health "Digital Challenge" project: