Thursday, November 7, 2013

ECM pushes quality up the stack

ECM, being a sea bottom dweller, has many opportunities to detect and fix issues with information architecture. This depends on the breadth of implementation and integration of the system, however, in most cases, applications which rely on metadata accuracy for processing and presentation will route out issue.

Many times an implementation will bump into a information quality issue by chance, for example, in a healthcare setting, billing information is used as the basis of coding patient tests. The source of this information comes from a registration system and if the hospital is large enough, it comes from multiple registration systems. The patient account number needs to be correct for insurance billing. For auditing purposes, the downstream/bottom dweller ECM system needs to be accurate. If it is not, then the exception is sent back up the stack for fixing. This fix more often than not exposes glitches/bugs in the way the integration engine functions. Sometimes it exposes issues from years ago, but a patient's chart information could have many years of visits and discharges associated with it, as well as non hospital related tests add to it. The bottom line is that an ECM system may only be used for scanning and indexing images, but it most likely is driving quality up to the surface of the more mission critical applications.

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