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Combining ECM and VNA Delivering Complete Patient Records

Providers must give clinicians secure, real-time or near real-time access to their patients’ complete medical records to achieve meaningful use.


Resource thumbnailTo fully achieve the meaningful use of electronic medical records (EMRs), healthcare providers must give their clinicians secure, real-time or near real-time access to their patients’ complete medical records. To that end, the proposed Meaningful Use Stage 3 requires healthcare providers to be able to easily access images. Doing so helps clinicians make better informed, more timely decisions that ultimately lead to improving the quality, safety and efficiency of care.

The real-world challenge, however, is aggregating all the relevant data – from structured to unstructured data, such as images, referrals and clinician notes – captured from an enterprise’s multiple departments and data repositories. Often, these various systems are not interoperable, rendering their data “islands of information” that requires end-users to access the systems individually. The rapid adoption of mobile devices to capture patient data has added another layer of complexity. And the proliferation of different types of information – including DICOM content, JPEG images on smartphones, documents in PDF, MPEG videos and paper-based documents – further taxes IT systems because they exist in incompatible forms. In short, EMRs can manage discreet data but cannot be relied upon solely to capture and manage all data flowing in and out of an enterprise.

Download the full article to learn about EMR limitations, leveraging a universal viewer, and the future state of technology for successful multiphase deployment.