This just to get documents from various affiliated regional hospitals and clinics to the main office to be scanned – page by page. You can imagine how long that must take with all of the patients that are seen each day and the mass amount of personal health information accounting for each individual.

Not only is this system tedious, expensive and time consuming – but it also poses high risks to patient privacy and security.

For example, one such healthcare organization employing this system incurred major fines and other fallout related to the loss of private, sensitive data after a van used to collect and transport the documents was stolen, along with reams of patient data inside.

It should come as no surprise that the facility needed to quickly replace its van-based data collection system with a more economical and secure solution. Ultimately, the organization put the vans up for sale and implemented a distributed, on-location scanning solution to avoid this same issue in the future. Not only does the new system eliminate a potential security exposure, but it’s also far more efficient and economical, saving the institution hundreds of thousands of dollars in transportation, paper and labor costs each year.

It’s far too often the case that something bad has to happen to make people and institutions alike change their behavior. But efforts to proactively update your systems can go a long way to helping improve the way your organization operates and setting your organization up to be interoperable.

Don’t wait for disaster to strike before modernizing your data management capabilities. Take action now to lead your organization into today’s world of interoperability solutions that improve the way you, your employees and your patients communicate.