92 PART III Rollout of an HCM
If you have chosen basic concepts in your initial project for the filing
plan or for access authorization, you should now start refining them.
Filing plan revisions affect all users. You should therefore take this opportunity
to approach the final digital filing plan as closely as possible.
✔✔Document signature. Sooner or later you will probably want to improve
the audit-proofing of your documents with a signature or time stamp. The
infrastructure for signatures is independent of the HCM system. As soon as
you can sign documents, however, you can extend your HCM system to
support the corresponding workflows.
✔✔Digitize and integrate conventional data sources. As long as a relevant
portion of the patient files is still available on paper, you cannot get rid of
paper-based files. Seems logical, doesn’t it? Therefore, make sure to digitize
all data sources over time. If a data source cannot be easily replaced by digital
data sources, use appropriate data converters. There’s a solution to almost
every problem… even if it just means to elegantly and efficiently scan
the paper-based documents.
✔✔Scanning solution. Even if all subsystems and all modalities in the house
already have digital outputs and are integrated within the HCM system, documents
on paper will appear time and again. Sometimes they originate
from the patients, but far too often documents are printed out just to be
signed
or marked. Always scan these documents on the spot.
✔✔Sharing data. If there is only a small amount of data in the HCM system,
sharing this data does not yet play a major role. The more your digital files
grow in the HCM system and the more comprehensive they become, the
more likely it is that you will start sharing data.