Does your organization needs a document management system for creation, organization, and storage of documents? Find out how to choose a solution properly.
If you’re a healthcare organization, you definitely create documents. But do you effectively manage those documents?
If you don’t, you’re throwing money down the drain. A business with 1,000 employees can waste as much as $3.5 million a year searching for (and likely not finding) important documents.
Your organization needs a document management system for creation, organization, and storage of documents, but how do you choose one? Are you struggling to identify criteria and find that ideal system that fits your needs? There are many solutions out there, but you need one that has these key components so crucial to healthcare organizations:
A traditional filing system is great for putting documents in, but not so great on getting documents and information out of the system. A robust search function is a crucial requirement for any document management system you may choose. You want a full text search capability and strong browsing software. Employees spend 1.5 hours per week searching for lost files. Multiply that times 1,000 employees and hourly rates, and that is a huge waste of money.
A standard file-naming convention and built-in strict processes in a document management software ensure proper filing, and greatly aid searchability and ability to quickly and accurately retrieve files. The ability to see how your information is stored so it can be retrieved easily and so incomplete files are easy to spot is essential when choosing your document management solution.
Most providers have legacy systems as well as the newest technologies, so you need a document management solution that fits both. Don’t be forced into purchasing a one-size-fits-most solution that doesn’t fit your current structure and doesn’t offer room for future expansion as technology changes. It’s important to have one that integrates across all systems—old and new; it needs to work seamlessly with your oldest printer and your newest smartphone app.
This is a must-have necessary for peak efficiency. Your staff needs to be able to access a document whenever and wherever they are from a centralized, web-based document hub.
Not every employee needs to see every file. A robust security system with various permission and access levels is yet another key component to consider before purchasing a document management system. You must protect not only patient data, but your financial, audit, compliance and other data as well. You want a system that will offer certain rights and privileges to different individuals or teams based on need and have the ability to track who has access as well. You want to do all this while storing the information in a single, secure system.
Professionals spend half of their time searching for information, and there’s a high cost for it too. Your organization will spend six times more on labor to search for misfiled documents than you spent on the original filing of that document. Reduce that labor cost by investing in a robust document management system that meets these important criteria.
