Healthcare Reform Upheld: Are You Prepared for the Effects?

My Colleague Dan West has some interesting thoughts on healthcare reform now that the initial dust has cleared…

Regardless of your view on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, yesterday’s Supreme Court decision is a signal to healthcare organizations to continue preparations for change. And if your organization hasn’t started, now’s the time. An analysis of the law by the Congressional Budget Office projects that by 2016 the number of non-elderly Americans covered by health insurance will increase by about 32 million.

No matter how you slice it, this means the potential number of new patients will increase. And along with an increase in patients comes more records, claims and information for healthcare organizations to handle, creating more challenges in areas like admissions, release of information requests and patient billing and finance.

According to an article from The New York Times, paperwork or documentation can take up to a third of physician’s workday. These administrative tasks take away from time spent with patients, limiting their ability to do their jobs. Adding more insured Americans increases the number of patients, records and subsequent paperwork that follows.

If you’re concerned your organization isn’t prepared to handle this increased influx, now is the time to start.

An enterprise content management (ECM) solution is designed to help you overcome these types of challenges. ECM allows you to store all of your organization’s unstructured content – like paper, forms or faxes – in one, central and electronic location. Additionally, ECM integrates directly with the other core healthcare information technology (HIT) applications throughout your organization.

That way, all of your systems are connected, allowing them to share information so your physicians and staff can instantly access the information they need right from the applications they are familiar with. This means physicians can spend more time with patients because they no longer have to waste time hunting down information.

All of this translates into doing more with less – exactly what you need to handle the influx of new patient information. Waiting until you feel the pressure means you have already waited too long. So acting now to develop a strategic ECM process will proactively enable your healthcare organization to manage the increase.

Making your processes more efficient with ECM means you get the most out of your available resources, so you know you are prepared