An internal study by one of Denmark's largest public hospitals has found that an enterprise content management system that pulls patient data from a variety of applications and locations is 64 times faster than the manual processes it replaced.

Odense University Hospital says it now takes a few seconds to compile an accurate, up-to-date patient chart using Hyland Software's OnBase ECM application. Previously, it took at least seven minutes to manually pull data from the different charts, applications and records - and that was only if all the documents were on site.

"Within seven seconds, you can have access to the patient's full medical record," said Jette Kotsis, section manager for medical records at Odense University Hospital. "It must be good for the patient, because the medical record is always there."

Kotsis says the drive to a paperless system began in 1992, when the hospital - which now boast 1,045 beds, 7,000 employees and serves about 100,000 patients annually - decided to jettison its paper records storage system and replace it with microfilm.

"We had nine kilometers of paper medical records," Kotsis recalled. "If we continued to receive future patients [and store their records], we would have had to build more storage space."