It’s no secret that information management is a huge challenge for hospitals, healthcare systems and caregiving facilities.
When you’re working in one of these organizations, you typically encounter several different information portals, designed for a variety of tasks, from intake to patient care. Too often, these platforms are poorly integrated, resulting in frustrating and inefficient processes. At some facilities, these processes may not even be fully digital.
To improve efficiency and maintain confidential information at your healthcare or life science organization, it’s essential that you merge these different organizational portals. Integrating your systems improves information administration and makes finding information as easy as possible for the entire staff.
Large healthcare systems comprising multiple hospitals face additional obstacles in information management. If your organization started out relatively small and has grown via acquisition, you’re likely to have competing technologies used for the same areas, such as patient care.
You may also have a variety of internal cultures, with different people responsible for health and safety within the hospital, for example. To make sure that everyone is following the same policies and procedures — and keep these documents up-to-date — it’s crucial to get human agreement about these topics and store the information in a central location.
The complexity of most healthcare organizations means that your information portal needs to accommodate a large staff as well as doctors, couriers and others who may not be part of the internal network. Doctors might not be on your hospital’s corporate wireless network, for instance, but still need access to policies and procedures. When designing a portal, consider how you’ll manage external availability for such situations.
With so many people involved, it’s often difficult to quickly locate and communicate with practitioners in other departments. A centralized directory accessible through an organizational portal helps improve efficiency and collaboration in this area.
Not only do collaborative systems support working across departments and streamlining communication around regulatory requirements, but they also support process automation that streamlines business and administrative tasks, such as inventory management and ordering systems.
Once you identify the needs of your organization’s staff, the portal is a great way to provide access to role-specific information and use automation to transfer data between various systems, reducing or eliminating many manual entry tasks, such as completing electronic forms.
Administrators and practitioners have different needs when it comes to quickly accessing information. By defining access profiles based on employee roles, a portal supplies the most relevant data for each role. This eliminates the need to dig through multiple databases and files, and makes it easier to put restrictions in place to maintain confidential information about patients and employees.
Most people working in healthcare are direct practitioners, and most of their work takes place directly within HIPAA systems, which have stringent compliance requirements. You don’t need the same level of secure access controls for information portals as you do for systems that actually contain medical records or have to meet HIPAA standards.
While information management is a major challenge for healthcare organizations, integrating your systems and developing portals are great ways to improve efficiency and make finding and maintaining information easier.
To learn more about improving information management for your healthcare organization, contact Portal Solutions.
