In today’s complex healthcare environment where reimbursement cuts are a reality and global economic hardship is felt across all medical facilities, practice administrators are eagerly looking for new cost effective solutions. New methods that will improve staff productivity, patient care and a way to eliminate the endemic of paper based workflows being used today.
When one talks about realizing an ROI, we tend to think of electronic health records, a new practice management system, and revenue cycle management. When we analyze where some of the additional inefficiencies lie, we recognize that there are many potential big cost savings waiting to be realized in several departments. From the business office, to financial services, we see the following common issues:
- Extensive employee time spent on paper based internal requests
- Difficulties in locating company documents and guides
- Manual workflows for approval process and feedback collections
- Lack of tracking various stages of organizational processes
- Paper based logs of medical devices maintenance and inspections
- Absence of Service request tracking system
- Paper based procedural form submission
Fortunately, Microsoft has offered a cost effective solution for these organizational challenges, all of which have been successfully applied to various size facilities. From large healthcare delivery systems to multi location medical organizations, SharePoint has become a favorite ECM (Enterprise Content Management) solution of the CIO and the Practice Administrator. SharePoint is an integrated suite of server components that provide comprehensive content management, automated business processes, and streamlined business information sharing. Through a highly flexible web interface, and intuitive workflow designer tools, this solution is not only affordable, but is completely web based.
The following is a summary of functionality and offerings that SharePoint brings to the healthcare industry:
- SharePoint provides a single and integrated powerful web portal for project tracking, clinical trials, marketing efforts, HR documents and the practice’s policies
- SharePoint offers a platform to apply business intelligence on financial data analysis as well as patient outcome measures
- SharePoint workflow engine enables the practice to digitize their business process
- SharePoint can centralize on-call calendar and surgical schedules
- Advanced search capabilities to facilitate document retrieval across LOB (Line of Business)
- Improved employee collaboration and internal communication
SharePoint implementations across health organizations have shown tremendous savings, and provided a true high ROI. Microsoft has been able to continue to provide a platform that helps transform information to impact every new release of the product. In a much anticipated new version as part of SharePoint 2010, Microsoft is promising to deliver a platform that will include social media management capabilities, offline functionalities, SharePoint Business Intelligence BI and many more exciting features.
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