ECM Author Offers Tips for Data Management
» Sandra Nunn, MA, RHIA, CHP, author
of the new AHIMA book Enterprise
Content Management and the Electronic
Health Record.
The lava flow of electronic information
into and around a healthcare organization
grows larger and more dangerous by the
day. Trying to contain this deluge of data
can seem impossible for those without
tight enterprise content management
(ECM) efforts.
In her new book Enterprise Content Management and the Electronic Health Record,
Sandra Nunn, MA, RHIA, CHP, discusses
the core ECM concepts important to HIM
professionals and offers guidelines on how
to organize, manage, store and retrieve the
unwieldy crush of daily healthcare data.
An expert in ECM, Nunn has created and
led enterprise records strategy in three
healthcare organizations and currently
works as principal at KAMC Consulting.
AHIMA Advantage recently spoke with
Nunn about the concept of enterprise
content management and its applications
to HIM.
What is a simple way to define
what enterprise content
management is?
ECM is an umbrella term covering document management, Web content management, search, records management, digital
asset management, work-flow management, capture, and scanning. ECM is
primarily aimed at managing the life-cycle
of information from initial publication or
creation all the way through archival and
eventually disposal.
Why are you personally
interested in ECM?
ECM presents such incredible opportunities to those of us who want to apply
information management skills to virtually limitless repositories of information
generated by technologies like SharePoint,
instant messaging, blogs, wikis, etc.
What is one challenge many
organizations don’t realize they
will face as they transition from
paper to electronic records
systems?
In the rush to turn all records into electronic files, many organizations do not
realize the enormity of the vast repositories
of electronic files they are creating. There
is a lot of organizational excitement about
how much money will be saved when
records are all electronic, when in reality,
there will be substantial cost in indexing
and organizing hundreds of thousands
of files in order for any information to be
located in the morass of information.
In addition, there has been virtually no
thought to retention management for
electronic records and the methods that
will be necessary to retain only what is
legally necessary from a business perspective. One of the reasons cloud technologies
have become necessary is that businesses
have failed to manage the creation, organization, and eventual destruction of their
information.
How can good enterprise
content management help
solve this problem?
ECM provides a suite of technologies that
skilled record management professionals
can use to index and organize organizational content as well as prepare that content for
advanced search technologies. ECM also
allows for the automation of the retention
process so that destruction of records can
take place on an automated schedule with
information manager approval.
Who is the intended audience
for your book?
HIM professionals exploring how to take
knowledge acquired through the development of EHRs to extend HIM management to other information domains in
their organizations. The book also presents
potential alternative information management career paths for HIM professionals.
The skills learned by HIM professionals
regarding records management, retention, and destruction can be applied to any
records, including those contained in an
ECM system.
What are some HIM roles
within ECM?
Content creators and/or editors assisting
enterprise knowledge workers to post content into content management systems or
onto Web sites (Web content management)
Records managers for administrative content throughout the information lifecycle
(responsibility for maintenance of the
organizational retention schedule)
Librarians of organizational content (
tagging of repository content according to
organizational information domains)
What has been the biggest
enterprise content management
problem you have faced to date?
I think the biggest challenge facing ECM
is the lack of familiarity with what the
technologies comprising it can do and how
they can reduce costs in organizations and
facilitate the implementation of EHRs.
The economic climate is such that healthcare organizations are devoting most of
their IT funds to the implementation of
EHRs and ICD- 10 transitions when even
small amounts of investment in ECM
products can save organizations large
amounts of money through the decommissioning of legacy systems and destruction
of unnecessarily retained information. v
