Document management for healthcare
Summary
Learn about the benefits of a document management system for healthcare environments.
Read time: 3 minutes
The role of document management in healthcare
Struggling to keep up with the amount of data and documents generated every day?You’re not alone.
To deliver a positive patient experience, healthcare institutions and medical practices must efficiently process many types of documents and information such as:
Hospital admissions/new patient onboarding
Lab orders and test results
Patient histories and clinical notes
Specialist referrals
Insurance pre-approvals and claims
Patient EOBs
Prescriptions
Follow-up care/post-operative instructions
Invoices, purchase orders, and billing
Most of these documents are digital – and start as digital forms, but some enter the workflow as hardcopy and must be scanned or faxed into a document management system (DMS).
Add industry-specific patient privacy and compliance regulations like HIPAA to the mix and it’s easy to see how the workload can get overwhelming, resulting in backlogs, omissions, and processing errors.
Many healthcare facilities already have an electronic health records (EHR) management solution to alleviate many of these pressures. Even so, the sheer volume of patients and paperwork make it difficult to keep up. For those that don’t have one, it can be complicated to implement.
Document management delivers more than efficient storage and retrieval of documents – though that is surely part of it. Ensuring the correct information and documents are accessible when needed helps patients get prompt and proper care and enables paperwork for insurance claims and payment to be processed in a timely manner.
Healthcare document management systems – putting patients first
Healthcare document management systems (DMS) are rarely an all-encompassing single application. Rather, they combine and integrate a variety of different applications to support various functions and departments such as Admissions, Scheduling, Referrals, Pharmacy, Human Resources, and Purchasing.
For example, an EHR system like DocuWare stores and freely moves digital documents across organizations, while the Payer Provider Payment Solution brings faxed hardcopy documents into digital workflows, and the Patient Referrals Solution digitizes referral processing.
Healthcare organizations can improve security, access data, and improve the patient experience by implementing a centralized document management system that can execute these functions.
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