68 PART III Rollout of an HCM
Digitization with HCM – who would benefit?
One thing is for certain: digitalization in itself already offers added value to
healthcare facilities. These include the prevention of duplicate files, the reduction
of archive and storage cost, the high availability of data, and much more. You
should be sufficiently familiar with the advantages of a digital infrastructure,
but these are not the main issue here. After all, you are reading the book Healthcare
Content Management for Dummies and rightly expect to learn how HCM
can make your life easier, or not. So let’s go!
HCM makes life easier because it
✔✔provides the space and simple means to digitize previously non-digitized
document types and integrate them into a digital structure. This allows you
to make them available to the overall process and easily advance digitization
(e.g. scanned documents).
✔✔ enables (simultaneous) access to medical information, regardless of
location.
✔✔ simplifies the search for medical data and finds desired information quickly
and reliably.
✔✔ simplifies access management by providing centralized, rule-based, auditable
access to all medical data based on predetermined definitions. If medical
data is distributed across multiple subsystems, a separate access policy must
be introduced for each system, which is complicated and prone to error.
✔✔ creates high data consistency, for example through centralized updating of
patient files, easy addition of follow-up information, or quick identification
and correction of faulty associations.
✔✔ greatly simplifies the use of medical data for the user: via one access point,
the users is provided with all the information they need. This simplification
results in more effective use of existing data. An example of this would be
the previous findings: if these do not have to be painstakingly identified, the
physician will more frequently take a look at them in order to be able to
better assess current findings.
✔✔ can compensate for the failure of other systems, such as the HIS, at least
temporarily.
✔✔ greatly simplifies the further processing of medical information, such as the
distribution of documents and images. Anything that is available quickly
and at a glance may also be shared quickly and easily, for example with referring
physicians or patients.