No, I am not going to tell you how to save millions of your own money nor am I going to preach how you should put 10% of your earnings into savings. Oh wait. I just did, didn’t I. Sorry about that. But since we are on the topic of saving, I will share with you something I think is important and haven’t touched on in a while, and that is going digital in Healthcare.
I was reading an article the other day on BBC Health News titled “ Going paperless would save NHS billions”. The article is about how the NHS (National Health Service) could, according to PwC as cited in the article, could save NHS as much as £4.4bn by going digital and leveraging information systems better. The idea of paperless patient records also allows staff to increase patient time by decreasing the administrative time taken by paper-based information. Yet, something in the back of my mind is saying I have heard this before. Ah yes, it was right here in the U.S. and the goal is to be paperless by 2014, or at least to be well on the way to paperless by then.
I must admit, while I have seen some progress, based on my personal experiences, I have not seen a huge amount of progress and I have been made aware that there are still issues related to standards and interoperability across the different vendors and platforms used by the healthcare industry. One vendor product does not support the other, meaning that my Physician cannot access the information provided by the Emergency Room I had to visit or the hospital I am in cannot access the information provided by my Physician. (I will save disucssion about the pain of healthcare providers being able to interact digitally with the insurance provers for another day.)
In my view, the concept of an all digital healthcare information infrastructure is a good one and for many valid reasons like cost reduction, increased time with patients, decreased time to process paper and so on, but the total picture is one of universal access to all authorized persons. This means there must be standardization across all vendors. There must be a level of interoperability that allows healthcare professionals to in fact, be able to share patient information seamlessly regardless of where it came from and whose system created it. I have not seen this as yet and until it becomes a reality, not only for the clinical side of the house but the entire enterprise which includes the administrative arms of healthcare, the goals and expectations of digital patient information systems will fall short.
Governments can look to the cost savings and increased efficiencies of digital patient records as a driver, but unless there is standardization and interoperability, these goals will remain just that. Perhaps one way to address it is to step back and see what the rest of the world is doing in relation to information standards. Perhaps the use of PDF/A to address some of these standardization issues is a good beginning. From there, the creation of central repositories within the hospital networks that would allow facilities in the same provider networks to share information. Next might be a move to get interoperability standards allowing the different vendors to communicate and share information seamlessly. I cannot imagine that this is not being discussed, but it is not clear as yet as to how much is becoming a reality. As the article pointed out, NHS could save as much as £4.4bn and I am sure the U.S. and healthcare providers in the U.S. stand to potentially do the same. The question as always is, how to get there and who paves the way.
If you are ready to move forward and are finding yourself stuck or unfocused and are not sure where to begin or what to do next, seek professional assistance and/or training to get you started. Be sure to investigate AIIM's Enterprise Content Management training program.
And be sure to read the AIIM Training Briefing on ECM (authored by yours truly). Click on the image to download and read.
What say you? Do you have a story to tell? What are your thoughts on this topic? Do you have a topic of interest you would like discussed in this forum? Let me know.
Bob Larrivee, Director and Industry Advisor – AIIM
Email me: blarrivee@aiim.org
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