From the October 2013 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
The ultimate goal is equipping clinicians with access to a patient’s complete medical history so they can deliver optimal diagnosis and treatment. Not only is it possible to achieve this objective, health care providers can also reduce costs at the same time — without undertaking the daunting task of consolidating information management systems.
Implementing a Cost Savings Strategy
The secret to cost savings is implementing a clinical information lifecycle management (CILM) software platform that manages data according to legal retention requirements. The rules of the platform (which can be personalized to meet each facility’s preferences) automatically delete information from multiple systems throughout the enterprise. These rules can be applied uniformly to multiple information systems and easily managed from a central location.
Lifecycle management can reduce current costs by curbing data growth through deletion of aging images and documents that no longer need to be maintained. This effort can also lower the cost of future data migration if a facility decides to adopt a consolidated archive.
Several key concepts for vendor-neutral archiving are essential to success: the ability to identify, synchronize and access images and various types of data that relate to each patient regardless of the storage location; and use of search parameters to collect information stored across multiple health care facilities that use different accession and medical record numbers. As part of this effort, health care facilities can simultaneously implement lifecycle management software to lower current and future expenses related to data storage. All of these activities should serve the overarching goal — presenting a holistic view of a patient’s medical history so clinicians can deliver an accurate diagnosis and determine the best course of treatment for each patient.
About the author: Cristine Kao is the global marketing director for Carestream's Healthcare Information Solutions portfolio, which includes RIS+PACS, vendor-neutral archiving, business intelligence/reporting tools and cloud services. She has more than 10 years of international experience in sales and marketing for healthcare IT solutions.
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