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Winning the EHR Battle with Enterprise Content Management
Learn how Sentara Healthcare created a comprehensive EHR solution. This article is based on a webinar presented by Hyland Software in May 2011.
Assembling a full-scale, workable electronic health record system is like solving a puzzle. There are multiple pieces, variables and options to coordinate. System designers at Sentara Healthcare in Norfolk, Va., faced this situation in 2003 when they embarked on their own EHR quest. Ultimately, the team decided on a comprehensive, integrated solution and not a single-source technology to meet their needs. The result: Roughly $34.5 million in business savings and benefi ts as of 2009.
Aaron Koehler, a senior software engineer at Sentara, the nation’s top integrated health system ranked by Modern Healthcare magazine, played a key role in the project. In a recent Healthcare IT News webinar sponsored by Hyland Software, Koehler explained that there’s no cookie-cutter approach to implementing an EHR system. Health care providers must carefully assess what confi guration best meets their needs. For Sentara, among other things, that meant including an enterprise content management (ECM) system as part of its EHR solution, the Sentara eCare Health Network®. This allowed the provider to effectively bridge the gap between paper and electronic documents.
“When Sentara planned for its EHR system, we had an ‘a-ha’ moment that we’d still be dealing with paper down the line,” Koehler said. “Even with the best laid plan, we still had an estimated 19 million paper documents from a wide range of entities. We knew the number would go down with EHRs, but there would still be paper – we addressed the paper issue using ECM.”
