Albertans Can Help an Australian Save Our Health Care System

Alberta’s health care system can be better. It must be better and the time is now. Albertans are ready for improvements and we’re willing to participate in the change.

On March 23, 2009, an Australian named Dr. Stephen Duckett took over the position of President and CEO of Alberta Health Services (AHS). Given a mandate to provide better service delivery, more efficient service delivery, better quality of care, better access and sustainability, he is the person Alberta is counting on to fix our health care problems. In a recent “May Message” on the AHS website, AHS Board Chair Ken Hughes encouraged Albertans to think differently about the challenges we face, and to all lend our support in addressing the issues.

I’m game. I want to help. I was born and raised in Calgary and now I operate a business in Alberta. I care about my community and universal health care is a strongly held value of mine. When Alberta’s health care services fail my family and friends I feel frustrated – even angry – as well as saddened by the state of the system. But I don’t want to have an adversarial relationship with Dr. Duckett. He’s the one guy who needs our help the most. If I can help improve this situation in anyway, then I’d like to try.

As Dr. Duckett progresses through the issues and pursues his mandate of improving our health care system, at some point he’s going to have to make some decisions about information management. “Efficiency”, “quality” and “sustainability” are all affected by technology. Within the information management category, Document Management is going to come up. On this topic, I can help. Over the past twelve years I’ve run several successful Enterprise Content Management (ECM) companies. I’ve been involved in over 100 full scale Document Management, Imaging and Workflow implementations and I know this business as well as anyone. I offer my expertise on this topic.

The bottom line is that ECM practices will help Alberta Health Services streamline operations, increase efficiency, reduce cost, increase compliance and report on their information. ECM is accomplishing these benefits for private sector businesses in many industries and other health care regions around the globe use Document Management, Imaging and Workflow solutions to run their operations. I offer to freely share my knowledge and experiences with anyone from AHS who’d like to learn more – and I extend that offer to anyone else who is reading this article. Here are a few critical points to understanding how to leverage the value of ECM solutions:

1. When starting an ECM initiative, you must focus on managing the documents that move throughout your operation the most.  This is called “Transactional Content Management” and this is where the Return on Investment is most easily calculated.  In the private sector, the initial focus is on back office operations, such as Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Human Resources processes (on-boarding, reviews), Contract Management etc.  This is where movement of documents occurs in high volume and is subject to both security concerns and compliance scrutiny.  The goal of Transactional Content Management is to automate processes to increase consistency, productivity and reduce cost.  Workflow, document scanning and integrating data and document systems are the primary technologies used.  For example, companies now scan invoices, route them electronically for approval and coding, and then upload the information automatically into the accounting system.  This is just one example of Transactional Content Management at work.  Any process that is document-intensive, deals with a large number of transactions and falls under the scrutiny of compliance officers should be considered a candidate.  This is where you’ll get the fastest ROI and where you’ll see the biggest impact on your operations.
   
   
2. It is commonly accepted that 70% of an organization’s information is contained within its documents.  There will be pressure to migrate information out of documents into data management systems.  This is an expensive and time consuming uphill battle.  While I acknowledge that some applications require information to be managed at the data level, many business functions are performing well managing and moving information at the document level.    In these instances, organizations are better off implementing systems to capture, move and manage their documents.  However, the critical success factor is that these documents must be properly indexed.  Don’t be persuaded by the lure of “full text searching”. By attaching proper index information to each document and then loading these ”index / document packages” into an ECM system, you will realize the following benefits:



1. Search:  Users can search on any combination of the index information in order to find individual or groups of documents.



2. Cross Referencing:  Documents with common attribute information, such as a health care number, can be automatically linked (regardless of file format or time of entry into the system).



3. Security:  An ECM system can control access, restrict who can make changes and even push documents to people depending on a document’s index information.



4. Workflow:  Documents can be routed through organizational processes in an automated or manual fashion based on proper indexing.  Business rules can be enforced automatically.



5. Systems Integration:  Data systems can be “document enabled” when index information is used to connect documents and data.



6. Records Management:  Freedom of information, privacy, retention, legal situations and audits are all controlled and enhanced with proper document index information.



7. Reporting:  Once you’ve properly indexed your documents, you can report on that 70% of your information that was previously not accessible or available to be mined.


3. Enterprise Content Management (Document Management) is attainable.  It’s the attainable IT vision of how information is captured, moved and managed throughout the enterprise.  Many positive steps have been taken in Alberta towards unifying health records – more focus needs to be placed on managing this information at the document level (not the data level).  This is the best IT money you’ll spend.

This is a critical time for Alberta’s Health Care system. We all have so much riding on Dr. Duckett’s success. I believe more Albertans need to speak up and lend their support. We need to share our expertise to help rebuild our health care system. Albertans can help an Australian save our health care system.


Article written by:
Sean Halliday

Sean Halliday is the President of Imagine eDoc Solutions Inc., a Calgary based Document Management, Imaging and Workflow solution provider. 

To learn more about Imagine’s solutions, please contact us at 403-245-6625 or visit www.imagineedoc.com for more information.