CHAPTER 2 What an HCM System Must Be Capable of 29
An HCM system kills several birds with one stone and can be used for various
use cases.
✔✔The retention of data in the original format (audit compliance): for regulatory
and forensic reasons, healthcare institutions should retain data in the
original format. Even if documents are to be further processed it is helpful
to keep the document in the original format of the editor.
✔✔The distribution of data for reading and/or viewing: the larger the circle of
potential readers, the less you can assume that a certain, possibly manufacturer
specific, software for displaying the data will be available everywhere.
As soon as documents are made available across multiple institutions, you
lose control over their IT infrastructure. In this case medical data can become
useless. In contrast to pure archiving, another point becomes relevant
when reading and viewing medical data: fast access time, which is ideally
short enough to allow the user to quickly review all potentially interesting
documents.
As you can see, this is a clash of conflicting requirements: audit-proof archiving on
the one hand, high data availability on the other, neither of which can be served
by
a classical archiving system nor by a subsystem alone.
An HCM system ideally should be capable of resolving this dilemma: it can
handle
fast and slow storage, manage and maintain different formats of the same
document,
and provide data via different interfaces to different systems.
HCM makes you smart
The beauty of an HCM system is its ability to consolidate medical data and tasks
while giving you maximum freedom in implementing the infrastructure. A hallmark
of an HCM system is its high level of interoperability, which enables you to
pursue different strategies and scenarios with regard to data storage.
One strategy could be to actually store all medical data in the HCM system and
distribute it from there. However, you can also decide to do the very opposite:
leave
the data physically in the IT systems in which it is generated and let the
HCM system access the data via appropriate interfaces. Of course, you can also
transfer the data available in the HCM system to other systems or applications (for
example, as raw data for smart data applications). For this to work, an HCM system
is based on standards that enable deep integration into the existing hospital IT.