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The new EMR system is accelerating the creation and management of patientrecords. One clinic, for example, had a basic patient records managementsystem that required approximately 12 steps to pull information from faxes,attribute it to a specific patient and incorporate the data into the patient'srecord. Swedish Medical Center's new EMR system uses Oracle Imaging andProcess Management to complete this task in only four steps, freeing staff tofocus on other responsibilities. Swedish Medical Center also slashed the timethat it took to assemble training materials for new and existing processesfrom 24 hours to as little as 4 hours for major productions, and even lesstime for individual manual productions.
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Geographically dispersed across three hospital locations, a freestandingemergency room and specialty center, and more than 70 clinic locations,Swedish Medical Center implemented an EMR system -- powered by Epic -- toimprove its ability to manage patient records and provide quality care. Aspart of this initiative, the healthcare provider required a content managementsystem to capture and process document-based data that is external to the EMRdatabase and can take a variety of forms -- including paper and electronicformats. Swedish Medical Center selected Oracle Universal Content Managementto manage Web-based content and Oracle Imaging and Process Management tocapture and manage faxed or scanned documents.
"We needed a comprehensive content management system that provides supportfor document and image capture and management, as well as workflow," saidNancy Richards, Content and Document System Architect for Swedish MedicalCenter. "After evaluating the scope of the requirements, we decided to usecomponents of the Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite for theirscalability, reliability and standards-based architecture, as well as theirability to integrate with our electronic medical record system. Thesecomponents, Oracle Universal Content Management and Oracle Imaging and ProcessManagement, are fundamental to the overall success of our EMR system."
Enabling Improved Operational Efficiency and Patient Care
Swedish Medical Center began rollout of its EMR system in February 2007and continues to deploy the solution and new functionality throughout itshospitals and clinics. The healthcare provider is deploying all of the Epicmodules. This includes the Registration/ADT module where patient informationis captured into the Oracle enterprise content management system for usethroughout the balance of the patient care experience.
Integrating the EMR system with Oracle enterprise content managementsoftware will enable Swedish Medical Center to make patient charts readilyavailable and accessible from any location in the Swedish Medical network whenthe rollout is complete. The integrated system is also expected to eliminatethe need to wait for patient charts to arrive at the point of care as well asthe use of local copies of records that are often incomplete.
The system is enabling Swedish Medical Center to standardize documentmanagement processes an
