Article written by Stephanie Onofri
The term “coordinated care” may not mean much to the average listener, but in the realm of Medical inpatient services where providing patients with the best and swiftest care without the risk of duplicating services rendered or making other very human errors, it means quite a lot. Coordinated care links social agencies, health plans, hospitals, and providers together into a single cooperative in which all manner of relevant medical information is available to all parties who need it.
What does this mean for all those hospitals that are so notoriously good at being slow and redundant? Well, although Accountable Care Organizations or ACOs (organizations that form coordinated care systems), are geared primarily to serving Medicare patients, this model provides a sustainable way to improve patient care across the board. Hospitals will no longer have to rely on multiple systems to store data or wait days or weeks to gather relevant patient records from other sources, such as insurance companies, social services, etc.
Maintaining a centralized system is the key to effective communication across Industry boards. With seamless integration, Enterprise Content Management builds a bridge to your Electronic Medical Record System. Imagine being able to retrieve all relevant patient records through a single interface without having to lift the phone to make a call or have your administrative personnel send out multiple e-mails to chase the paperwork. And imagine further if your medical provider could view the same electronic document as your mental health counselor (just an example here) at the very same time without the delay posed by paper documents.
While many Industry leaders have already adopted ECM as a solution for their records management and as a way to facilitate the cohesiveness ACOs, some still reserve certain concerns. Cost-effectiveness, security, compliance How does an ECM software solution actually maintain these? Sure, on-premise or Cloud-based electronic document storage seems like a good idea in theory, but how does it address more imminent concerns?
Benefits of ECM for Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs):
- Be able to view and search through multiple patient documentation and records provided by the organizations in the ACO on a single interface simultaneously
- The custom ECM solutions help ACOs efficiently meet criteria standards mandated by local government entities
- Built-in automation for standard processes such as patient check-in and check-out logs, archiving of medical records, and simple audits
- Audits and security controls that allow only authorized personnel to access certain patient data facilitate compliance to regulatory standards
According to an article in Mays Business Online, approximately 98,000 deaths and $3.5 billion in costs can be traced back to procedural and interpretive medical errors. These errors are mainly caused by the manual transference of information across medical record-keeping systems. Often these medical records are misspelled, misplaced, misfiled, duplicated, or utterly lost. And since an accurate history is necessary in order to accurately diagnose and asses the health of a patient, a comprehensive and centralized set of medical records is crucial to ensure patient care.
If departmental growth, progress, or faster and more cost-effective patient care appeals to you or your medical institution, contact DataBank today and find out how a software solution tailored to your unique specifications can make you a leader in the medical industry! You can also download our free Ultimate Guide to ECM below!
