CHAPTER 8 Let’s Do It: How to Implement Your HCM Project 77
often the case that data of patients who had been in the hospital a long time ago
needs to be stored as well. For such visits the HCM system naturally depends on
the patients and their cases. A good HIS will be able to provide this data to an
HCM system retrospectively. An existing communication server may also still
have this information available.
Only when all movements of the patient within the hospital and all administrative
adjustments to patient demographic data, cases, and movements have been
transmitted safely to and correctly acknowledged by an HCM system should you
proceed to the next step.
Step two: prepare structuring of data
Even in an analog world, a filing plan is the basis for the systematic structuring of
documents and images. There is also likely to be a methodology used in your institution
that everyone could live and work with. If you now think that you have
already won half the battle for having a filing plan in an HCM context, we have to
disappoint you. Within paper files, documents are usually divided into registers.
The documents are sorted according to exactly one characteristic. However, documents
do in fact have several characteristics, such as the document type, the
department that created them, or the level of confidentiality. This diversity cannot
be mapped to an analog world of filing plans.
Therefore, you should not migrate the analog filing plan into your HCM system!
You will not be spared having to rethink it. Work out a filing plan with several
classifications for your documents or images. This way, a document or image can
be classified according to any number of characteristics. Examples for such classifications
are:
✔✔by department (e.g. anesthesia, surgery, internal department, …)
✔✔by data type (e.g. document, image, biosignal, …)
✔✔ following an examination (e.g. sonography, ECG, CT, MR, laboratory, …)
✔✔by data type (e.g. medical report, findings, prescription, administrative documents,
…)
Exercise care when classifying and devote some time to it. Consider
how users are using the existing structure of patient data and decide
whether the current procedure is good or in need of improvement.
Check whether the new filing plan would still represent good practice
as well as improve less effective ones.