38 PART I Healthcare Content Management: The Holistic View on Medical Data
The Potential Routes of Digital Data
Listing all forms of digital medical and patient files, portals and pilot projects
with their different scenarios would not only be very time consuming, but also
very boring. That is why we limit this to highlighting the essential concepts and
placing them in the context of an HCM strategy. This makes our and your work
much easier.
In general, digital data streams can be grouped in a very pragmatic way according
to their user group and the author of the documents (see Figure 4.1). This results
in the following scenarios:
✔✔Digital documents (digital files) are used by their author exclusively.
✔✔An author uses his own documents and additional documents of external
authors.
✔✔Digital documents are used both by the author and by external parties.
✔✔Data from different authors is shared and used across institutions.
Figure 4.1: Institutions operate an HCM system primarily for their own purposes.
When fully expanded, an HCM system provides the digital hospital file. It thus
provides the best prerequisites for the exchange of data across institutions.