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Document Management: Putting Together the Pieces


By Beckie Kelly Schuerenberg, Senior Editor August 2007
Many health care organizations initially used document management systems for relatively small projects. A lot of these early projects focused on meeting the needs of billing, medical records and registration departments.

Now, some organizations are using the technology on an enterprisewide scale, building on the early successes.

For example, Asante Health System, a two-hospital delivery system in Medford, Ore., broadened its use of document management technology after a successful pilot in one department.

Back in 2002, the organization tested the system in its patient registration department to gain buy-in from users, says Alan Curriston, senior program analyst. When staff members in other departments learned they could easily access documents electronically rather than waiting for a courier or fax to deliver them, they too wanted to be part of the project.

Over the past five years, Asante's I.T. staff has had a difficult time keeping up with requests to access the system. They have enabled more than 800 staff members across 40 departments to use it to manage about 13 million documents.

"We started in registration because that's where the paper begins," Curriston says. "But lots of other departments need to see registration documents later on. So the desire to use the system to manage other documents really spread word of mouth from there. It's the one system that people have come to us for."

Eliminating Paper

Document management technology enables organizations to digitize paper documents into electronic forms that can be stored, managed and transmitted. Small provider organizations often implement such systems to help eliminate paper for a single process, such as to manage registration or billing documents, or as a transition to a electronic health records system.

"A make-shift electronic health records system is one of the classic uses for document management technology," says Alan Worsham, vice president at Beacon Partners Inc. "But there's certain things that aren't easily put into a traditional EHR. So there will always be extra documents that can be put into a document management system so it also can be used as a component to a full-blown EHR."

Many larger payers and providers also use document management technology. Though they might have the resources to implement it enterprisewide, these organizations also often limit the technology to niche applications because they already have or plan to implement other systems specifically designed to automate most of their processes.

Some hospitals, like Asante, are discovering that once successes are achieved with a document management system in one department, others want to use it as well.

But making broader use of document management systems throughout an enterprise can be quite complex, requiring organizations to spend a lot of time and money to develop storage and indexing strategies. This broader use also requires implementing new workflow processes in multiple departments for how documents will be retrieved, transmitted and managed in the application.

"Document management systems are raw pieces of technology that need a lot of implementation and configuration to be put to use," says Kyle McNabb, principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc., Cambridge, Mass. "So they are easier to get funded if they are done as a small project rather than on an enterprisewide scale."

But now that some health care organizations, like Asante, have had a few years of experience with the technology, they are broadening the scope of how it can be used within their facilities, he adds.

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