What is content management?
The Association for Intelligent Information Management (AIIM) defines enterprise content management (ECM) as "the strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. It's the architecture that glues your documents and business content together — making them searchable, explorable, organized, and ultimately meaningful.”
Why is content management important?
Content management has become a critical component in healthcare, and a multifaceted one at that. It involves people, processes, and technology that are organized into a greater strategy. And as organizations continue down the digital path and evolve their technology, the need for content management escalates.
So how do healthcare organizations operationalize content management into a sound, governing strategy for people, processes, and technology? It’s an evolving initiative for most organizations, but it most often includes an enterprise content management system or document management system (DMS).
Why leverage an enterprise content managament (ECM) system or document management system (DMS)?
Both systems help organize and unify data, provide secure access to systems and users, and automate manual workflows. An ECM system may support additional data types, provide more advanced workflow and collaboration capabilities, and provide full data life cycle management tools. It is critical for organizations to properly evaluate the capabilities of their electronic health record (EHR), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and legacy enterprise systems to understand the right balance of ECM or DMS for the enterprise.
What are the key features and benefits of an ECM system?
ECM is the process of managing information of all types. From clinical to business content—it all needs to be captured, managed, stored according to retention policies, integrated with key systems for accessibility within user workflows, and measured for the reporting required by your organization. And an ECM system is the tool to accomplish it all.
An ECM system provides critical features like:
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| Process automation |
Whether your organization has basic or advanced capture needs, an ECM system has the flexible solution for you. From barcode scanning and other core document imaging tools to more advanced features like optical character recognition for automated indexing, an ECM system is ready to be configured for your content. Additionally, an ECM system can offer an integrated scanning tool for capture within EHR workflows. |
| Retention management |
A key component of the digital content lifecycle is the retention policy that guides it. Healthcare organizations are tasked with executing retention policies for clinical and business content alike and must adhere to the more stringent of federal or state requirements. An ECM system provides the ability to create and manage retention policies for each of your content types, including notifications for final destruction. |
| Systems integrations |
Connecting disparate systems is a key function of an ECM system. Seamlessly integrating content from your ECM system with other critical systems like your EHR or ERP unifies content and enables effective workflows. Archiving older data within an ECM system and using integration tools to connect this data to your EHR or ERP is one of the most powerful ECM capabilities. |
| Enterprise search |
Similar to the flexible capture levels, ECM systems offer varying degrees of search capability. The most sophisticated of which is enterprise search. The conceptual based search turns keywords into accelerated insights. Regardless of the file format, enterprise search can discover it. The power of enterprise search lends itself to other reporting needs to uncover trends, patterns, and relationships to deliver holistic intelligence and reduce blind spots. |
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