The following is a guest article by Jeff Lusby, General Manager, Healthcare IT at Quest Diagnostics
As healthcare organizations continue to mature with technology solutions, it has become increasingly critical to evaluate the need to archive this key data. Fifty percent of health systems will have to archive 7 or more disparate systems, including what they currently archive, in the next 1-3 years and an enterprise content management (ECM) system is the perfect host for this data.
What is enterprise content management?
The Association for Intelligent Information Management (AIIM) defines “enterprise content management as the strategies, methods, and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. It’s the architecture that glues your documents and business content together — making them searchable, explorable, organized, and ultimately meaningful.”
An ECM system is the technology that operationalizes a content management strategy as it offers flexible capture tools to ingest legacy data and deliver it to the systems and users that need it for workflows, compliance adherence, and long-term retention management.
Transferring legacy data to ECM
Moving your legacy content to an ECM system is a very streamlined, structured process of extracting, converting, and ingesting data. During this process, organizations may choose to incorporate a data cleanse to purge expired records before ingestion. Once ingested into the ECM system, retention policies are available for configuration to protect your data and keep your organization compliant.
Unlock the value of ECM for archived data
With archived data in an ECM system, the management tools and integration points with other systems unlock new levels of accessibility and process efficiency. An ECM system delivers right-sized data capture options to support capture within EHR or ERP workflows or capture within the ECM system with bar code recognition and advanced optical character recognition for indexing. The ECM system can be configured to serve newly captured content to other systems or to an automated workflow that is designed to prompt users to take action. The opportunities are endless to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver both clinical and business operations data.
Protect and defend with ECM
A key driver for organizations to archive and protect data with an ECM system is to remain compliant with federal and state retention requirements and protect this data from risk. Risk presents in unprotected or unsupported legacy systems, e-discovery requests for maintained yet expired records, and more. (If your organization maintains data longer than required and that data becomes part of a legal e-discovery process your organization is responsible for providing the data within the expected timeframe, which can be a very expensive process.) An ECM system provides streamlined processes for access, audit requests, and e-discovery processes alike. Because that’s what content management is all about—helping people, processes, and technology evolve to best support organizational needs.
For organizations with an ECM system in place, archiving data here makes perfect sense to help reduce the tech footprint while turning archived data into protected, searchable, and shareable content. And for organizations without an ECM system in place? The perfect solution to consider.
To learn more about enterprise content management, visit the Quest Diagnostics ECM Resource Center.
About Jeff Lusby
With almost 30 years in healthcare IT, Jeff has extensive experience with technology implementations from the sales journey to installation, support, and account management. In his current role as general manager, Jeff leads the Quanum Enterprise Content Solutions software business that serves the healthcare IT community with enterprise document and content management solutions and services. Jeff leads with a focus on process improvement and automation to bring organizations operational efficiency and maximum return on investment. Jeff holds a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Cincinnati.
Quest Diagnostics is a proud sponsor of Healthcare Scene.
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