6 Must-Have Features for Your Healthcare Enterprise Content Management System
Taylor Pettis 
March 16th, 2021
Healthcare is a part of life that touches us constantly and in different ways. Often it’s a matter of routine: caring for patients during annual check-ups or even routinely for chronic issues. Other times, delivering health to patients is more urgent, requiring speed to meet the immediacy of life-saving treatments.
Whether fast or slow, the moving pieces of delivering healthcare feel vast and chaotic because of the sheer numbers of people and documents involved. Yet could there be any other aspect of life where eliminating chaos is so vital to providing care? As patient records and supply orders fly back and forth, hospitals, clinics, and healthcare providers need time to focus on what’s most important – patients – while their enterprise content management system (ECM) for healthcare works in the background to control the chaos.
As you seek an ECM solution for your healthcare organization, here are six must-have benefits and features your patients, providers, and vendors will appreciate and you will come to rely upon.
1. Security and Compliance for Healthcare Content
First and foremost, you need to have a lock on the content moving across, in, and out of your organization. Your enterprise content management system for healthcare should provide:
- Tiered controls
- Permission-based access
- Security-specific SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions, such as 24/7 customer and IT support
Regulations are part of your daily vocabulary in the healthcare industry. There are few documents and records in this world that require tighter security and stricter compliance than those related to healthcare. Even when you and your colleagues are perfect at meeting security and compliance required for documentation, there are always attempts from outside your organization to gain access to and exploit the health-related data you try so ardently to keep safe.
In 2020, these attacks on healthcare records gained momentum as remote work was expanded and people at large became more susceptible to attempts by bad actors to gain access to personal health data. Yet as hackers and scammers attempt every day to break into your organization’s data, a modern ECM system thwarts those attempts every minute of every day for healthcare companies just like yours.
It’s no surprise that security and compliance are a top priority for any decisions relating to how a healthcare business manages documents. Enterprise content and record management for healthcare that prioritizes those requirements as much as you do will save you the stress and costs associated with data and security breaches.
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2. Solid User Experience (UX) through Customization
If you build it and people don’t come to it, we’re back to square one. Your enterprise content management system for healthcare should deliver a good UX through must-have features like:
- Logical, easy-to-use interfaces
- Customization to match your branding
- Automated processes that integrate with your existing workflows
Seeing after one’s health is chock full of complexities. With health insurance, in- and out-of-network providers, medications, appointments, and just about everything else that touches a person’s health, a good user experience can help ease the pains of navigating a truly complex landscape. Plus, patients are a bit different from a standard online or in-person shopper because the things they are browsing and selecting directly impact their health and livelihood, not to mention their finances.
With the onslaught of innovation in the patient and provider experiences – telemedicine, wearables, and chatbots to name a few – ensuring your healthcare company’s user experience is both customized and easy to navigate can have far reaching benefits for every aspect of how you deliver care today.
And patients aren’t the only consideration. When your own staff, vendors, and suppliers can easily find their way to the specific content they need in that moment, you’re doing more than saving time. Morale, business relationships, and even pricing can be welcome benefits to using a medical content management system with stellar UX.
3. Mobile Access via Healthcare Enterprise Content Management
These days everything is literally in the palm of our hand, and your enterprise content management platform for healthcare should provide features that put your content there as well. Look for features like:
- Mobile-friendly or responsive design
- A mobile app component
- Security protocols for health data privacy
In 2020, right as the COVID-19 pandemic began to impact communities across the globe, a new rule from federal officials opened the door for patients to download their health information and patient records via their smartphones. The change reflected how healthcare consumers, and internet users at large, tend to use their mobile devices more readily than paper or physical documents, as well as their own desktop or laptop computers.
Even as people in business often use desktop or laptop computers to get our work done, mobile access is a reality and it’s vital that we design and deliver our content in ways that are mobile-friendly. This means that purchase orders, patient orders, invoices, contracts, and all healthcare documents should interface with a user regardless of the size or shape of the screen they’re using in that moment. Your enterprise content and record management for healthcare can make that possible as mobile access is today’s necessity rather than a nice-to-have feature.
4. Cloud-Based Deployment
Whether your business wants to reach for The Cloud or keep your feet on the ground, look for features in a healthcare medical content management system that let you be wherever you want to be through:
- Cloud-based storage permitting users to have access without geographical constraints
- Options for on-site storage, or even a hybrid of cloud-based and on-site, to meet your organization’s needs
- Speed and security for all options
In an industry where flexibility is hard to come by, healthcare has more options today for medical document management that can be accessed wherever and whenever users are at the moment. Cloud-based records management has gained traction substantially as working in the cloud has become more routine and normalized in business, and especially as individuals in your organization have gotten more familiar due to their personal use of virtual content.
Whether your business wants to push into the cloud or stay grounded in physical space and storage, your healthcare content management platform should be flexible enough to meet whatever requirements you have.
5. Integration with Your Legacy Systems
Cause delight instead of friction by choosing an enterprise content management system for your healthcare business that feels like an upgrade instead of just another app to learn. Frictionless features of the ECM should:
- Seamlessly integrate with your established CRM, ERP, or HRM
- Eliminate the need for users to switch back and forth constantly between tools
- Improve efficiency as the systems work as one to manage your content
How many apps do you use in the course of a normal workday? The reality is probably more than you might guess, and requiring employees to use too many apps or systems will lead to frustration. In fact, 67% of surveyed workers revealed they’d love it if they could take care of everything they work on in a single window. Having to constantly switch and even sign into different apps wastes time and harms employee morale.
A great ECM avoids those issues by fitting into your existing systems – the ones you and your teams have used for years and know inside and out – with the ease of a final puzzle piece to complete the whole picture. Users will only feel the benefits of having better processes and workflows because the medical content management system has become an integral part of what they use daily.
6. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning
Good tech is evolving tech, and your healthcare enterprise content management system should be on the forefront of what’s available:
- Smart technology that learns from day one of installation
- Intelligent capture of data and text through OCR and even more robust technology
- Adaptive analysis that does the heavy lifting of combing through mountains of data
Healthcare will always be a person-to-person industry due to the nature of its mission: to improve the health and lives of the patients it serves. Yet we all know machines and technology have advanced the delivery of healthcare to heights we could only dream about a century ago.
Machines and technology can also support the humans in healthcare through medical document management and, as AI and machine learning gain prevalence, they can help you gain time and accuracy by delving into the details of health records. And, just as your best employees learn to do their jobs better over time, machine learning in your ECM continues to improve once it gets started with your healthcare documentation.
A Great Prognosis for Your Health Organization
In healthcare, finding out what’s wrong is the first step to figuring out how to make it right. As technology and expectations continue to evolve drastically for how health is delivered – and especially how well it is delivered – zeroing in on ways to make health content management work better is a great and necessary step for your organization to take.
And just as every patient is different, so too is every medical business. The features and benefits you want in an enterprise content management system for healthcare will be specialized for what your goals are, even as they also meet more common requirements familiar to this industry.
MHC gets that what you do every day impacts lives and is impacted by strict regulations, which is why we offer ECM solutions that organize your business areas across the board. From your accounting to supply chain and human resources to healthcare records, we help you stay compliant, agile, and organized through our content management solutions for healthcare.
When you’re ready to give your content management a clean bill of health, MHC is ready to deliver the treatment you need.
