Susan deCathelineau, MS, RHIA, vice president, global healthcare sales and services at Hyland Software, discusses how a clinical content strategy can provide the electronic medical record (EMR) with more relevant patient information and easier secure access to that information. She has more than 20 years of healthcare technology and operations leadership experience, providing management and consultant services for health information management, revenue cycle and EMR strategies. She was responsible for the enterprise-wide OnBase implementation at Allina Health, which included the integration with the Epic EMR initiative. 

At Hyland, deCathelineau is responsible for developing and implementing a global strategic vision, to ensure OnBase Healthcare solutions and services earn customer loyalty and deliver operational excellence. Prior to joining Hyland she was director of corporate information services at Allina Health System and vice president of Product Management at QuadraMed.

Q: OnBase by Hyland recently announced a new clinical content strategy. Can you give an overview?

A: The clinical content strategy is the building blocks to formalize a solution beyond the EMR. It provides secured access to view information through a patient window that is utilized across the enterprise. Clinicians, radiologists and even coders can access the information to see the content specific to their roles. They can view patient records, compare patient timelines and make decisions impacting patient care.

OnBase also features alerts for caregivers and others, letting them know when new information has been added to the records they are accessing. This provides the right information to the right provider at the right time in the right context to help support the right decision. This saves clinicians and staff valuable time by also providing them with a special view that displays just the content that was added since they last viewed the window. This also brings a patient safety aspect to the strategy to make sure nothing is overlooked. 

An important aspect of this is organizing the content for the specialty roles in the healthcare setting. For example, a dermatologist will have access to information specific to his practice such as a wound photo whereas a cardiologist will have access to the information that applies to her specialty such as an echocardiogram.

Q: What are the challenges this will look to solve in healthcare organizations?

A: One of today’s challenges is unstructured and inconsistent data that make traditional clinical applications difficult to use in healthcare IT. Our customers come to us searching for solutions as they try to manage and utilize the information they’ve collected from multiple disparate systems. If clinical content is not available in the EMR, healthcare professionals are often at a loss to find the missing information. OnBase provides a central repository in archiving and managing the life cycle of this critical content.  No matter if the patient is seen at the clinic, hospital, or at home, healthcare professionals can access patient information to support continuity of care. 

OnBase provides the platform to bring all types of content together, including DICOM images, providing a vendor neutral archive. This provides the ability to share critical information across various clinical settings, eliminating the need for the patient to transport information to their different care providers. 

Another challenge in healthcare IT today is security. With breaches occurring almost daily, it leaves decision makers, and even patients, wondering how secure stored information is. One of the ways the information is secure is that OnBase Anywhere grants role-based access – providing information only to relevant users. OnBase provides a detailed audit trail that records every move within the system, including who accesses what, what changes are made and who makes them.

Q: What specifically makes Hyland’s solution better than any other on the market?

A: The OnBase suite of clinical solutions provides the tools needed to manage information across the patient life cycle on a platform that was developed by Hyland.  By archiving images and patient information; providing role based access across the enterprise and ultimately securely sharing this information, OnBase provides healthcare provides greater capabilities to positively impact the health of their patients.