DMS for Small Clinics: How to Manage Records like a Hospital

 

As a small clinic, you have limited resources to handle records. Compare your situation to a hospital boasting a large staff, with an IT department and a dedicated system to manage all their documents; your clinic needs a helping hand.

Filework is unskippable whether you're a health professional or working in administration. If you don’t have the workplace strength to manage an influx of documents (like a hospital does), implementing a document management solution can help. This article aims to explore the reasons to use a DMS as a small clinic as well as the means to manage your documents like a hospital does.

Why use a DMS?

Most hospitals use electronic health records (EHR) or electronic medical record (EMR) systems. These are focused solutions built to manage medical records for hospitals. Consequently, they are expensive and hard to implement; they are also restricted to storing only specific types of medical forms, not the rest of your documents. Users require extensive training to operate EHR and EMS solutions due their difficult learning curve. Fortunately, DMS is a robust and thriving alternative to these (largely) restrictive solutions.

DMS is an effective, affordable and flexible solution to store medical records and all other types of files. Since the application of DMS stretches into nearly every industry, it comes with a wide set of features that can be used as applicable to you. Organizing healthcare records in a secure and compliant database can improve your clinic’s file management.

Take advantage of digitization and automation

Through the integration of optical character recognition (OCR) software, the text present on scanned or uploaded documents can be read by a DMS—this can either be edited or replaced in electronic forms, or can be stored as data to help in search. With the help of OCR, a DMS can run a full text search (or a Robust Search, as we call it) so that you can search through a document’s content and find the desired file from your database.

Digitization can be coupled with DMS’s automation features to do even more. Automation can reduce manual data entry work, in addition to processing specific medical records and patient documents. We encourage automation in order to speed up employee workflows and boost productivity at work.

Use secure file sharing features

The medical field is laced with regulations and ethics. HIPAA (in the United States) requires mandatory encryption for the purpose of sharing patient health records with other entities for medical reasons. In general, it is unsafe to send sensitive patient documents over email. Sharing documents through DMS is easy and highly secure—send the recipient a link to an accessible file in your database, and your DMS allows them to view the document through a secure two-way encrypted connection.

To find out more about the insights and benefits of DMS in healthcare, head over to our blog. If you’re looking to implement a DMS as a small clinic, contact us here; we’d love to help you make a good decision.