Niche Aspects of Healthcare and Finance Document Management
Although in practice each of these respective professions is very different, they are quite similar in two ways: Firstly, the amount of new legislation each industry faces in terms of compliance challenges; and secondly, the degree to which failure to meet legislative standards will inflict reputational and business damage to each industry.
However, learning about document management software and its ability to simplify compliance issues in both these industries will help professionals in healthcare and finance tackle the niche aspects of legislative demands they regularly face.
Healthcare Document Management Software
Especially given the rate of healthcare data breaches in 2015, email is no longer justifiable for the sharing of protected health information (PHI) because of the security risks it imposes.
However, current technology in the form of a web portal is available to combat this phenomenon so healthcare organizations can keep their document efforts safe, secure, and protected from breach.
Most document management vendors offer an email replacement feature with highly encrypted technology—patient and web portals. Hospitals and healthcare administrators must examine the bottom line and consider whether it is worth keeping traditional EMR systems intact given this newfound technology.
With the exception of the financial industry, the healthcare industry has seen the most legislative transformations—both in concept and practice.
For instance, the concept of healthcare has changed with the advent of mobile devices’ Internet access via the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) phenomenon among healthcare practitioners and administrators, which has raised questions regarding the security and content of patient information.
However, consumer mobile devices and document management solutions co-occur and have a potential intersection at the point of security: How are organizations to secure, monitor, and protect employees’ use of mobile devices for transmitting and viewing protected data, especially when employees bringing their own devices to work means letting them take these same devices home with them?
The solution is mobile document management, which the best vendors bring to the table, providing features such as role-based user permissions and automated data backup with both physical and artificial locations, therein enabling workers to put their offices in their pockets. These mobile applications also significantly reduce the cost of the healthcare IT infrastructure and the potential compromising of private health information.
Although EHRs (Electronic Health Record) solutions and EMRs (Electronic Medical Records) are viewed as the standard in hospital administrators’ minds, and for good reason, document management solutions do still offer several benefits over either of these traditional paperless models of information management in the healthcare industry.
For instance, Chris Beebe, PhD and Director of Human Resources at Raleigh General Hospital in Beckley West Virginia notes that file retrieval times for his document management solution are much faster than they are with traditional EMR/EHR solutions.
Beebe even notes at one point in his eFileCabinet success story that the system was so fast at retrieving files that he wanted to time the file retrieval test just to see how fast it was. The results? He was able to find a document in under ten seconds, and twelve at most if he wanted to print it, too.
Finance Document Management Software
Buyouts, company sales, and mergers are dictating how the finance industry relates to its customers as much as they are the internal processes of these organizations—placing into question the legitimacy of preexisting information management models, and rightfully so.
As a growth-sustaining technology and strategy, document management software is an integral tool for financial departments and financially centered organizations/departments as a whole, enabling these organizations to complete mergers, acquisitions, and buyouts securely and successfully while simultaneously ensuring the security of customer and client information. This is especially important amid SEC regulations that advocate document management software use.
The intensely regulated nature of this industry has imposed significant operational barriers to financial institutions, and these burdens cannot be overcome through additional human capital alone. Rather, technology itself should be considered a human capital investment.
Just look at the influx of new legislation that came into light in the wake of the housing market downfall: Graham-Leach-Bliley, Sarbanes-Oxley (sections 404 and 302), IRS revenue procedure 97-22, NASD 3010, NYSE 342, and Dodd-Frank. All of these pieces of legislation pertain to the tracking of information that keeps organizations accountable, and nothing achieves this feat more easily than the right document management solution.
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