20 PART I Healthcare Content Management: The Holistic View on Medical Data
Enterprise Content Management comprises the technologies used to
capture, manage, store, preserve and deliver content and documents
to support organizational processes. (Definition of the Association
for Information and Image Management (AIIM))
Adaption for Healthcare
Digital data in healthcare institutions underlie special conditions that make a
digitalization
strategy a challenge. Laws and regulations provide a comparatively
narrow framework for the handling of patient and treatment data. Therefore, an
ECM concept cannot be applied directly on healthcare facilities – however, the
five essential tasks of ECM are also relevant for healthcare facilities. Medical data
also must be
✔✔ captured,
✔✔managed,
✔✔ stored,
✔✔preserved and
✔✔delivered.
Combining these five elements with the specific requirements of healthcare in
patient care results in a new concept: Healthcare Content Management.
Healthcare Content Management (HCM) describes a concept that
aims to collect all medically relevant data of a healthcare facility and
to make it usable on a unified platform facility-wide (and, where applicable,
across facilities).
HCM – Why And When?
The question of sustainable digitalization strategies is relatively new for many
healthcare facilities. For a long time, the question of data consolidation simply
did not arise because too much medical information was paper-based and too
little was generated and managed as bits and bytes. Only recently has the critical
threshold of digital content been crossed, above which institution-wide digitization
concepts make sense. If you are wondering whether HCM is also relevant for
your institution and if it’s worth reading on, ask yourself the following questions.