A patient’s trust in their healthcare provider can be put in jeopardy from the moment they register for services. Manual processes, human error, a rapidly growing industry and disjointed IT systems combine to compromise healthcare operators’ ability to provide patient records with the immediacy and accuracy necessary to maintain confidence, while ensuring that they meet regulatory requirements and keep costs in check.

The efficient management of patient information has become a key metric to improving the quality of patient care, but the prognosis for improvement has been less than promising in many organizations: healthcare administrators struggle to meet the growing expectation of patients to have immediate access to their records at the point of care; doctors increasingly require a single source of truth for better decision-making – a comprehensive patient file that includes hand-written notes, scanned images, transcriptions and x-ray images, plus documents generated by a wide range of medical applications; And this burgeoning trail of records relies on manual processes that are prone to human error, which in turn can cause misdiagnosis or mistreatment, and eventually may even result in malpractice action.

The issue of patient record proliferation has had negative organizational impact as well. As the industry expands, so does the number of patient records and the costs associated with administration. The need to implement more efficient processes that will keep costs down becomes more imperative with every year – while at the same time, administrators are caught in the middle as they try to meet regulatory requirements that mandate increased information storage, maintenance, and accessibility for longer periods of time.