The Christ Hospital is a 555-bed not-for-profit acute care facility located in Cincinnati, Ohio. For more than 120 years, it has been consistently recognized as one of the top 50 hospitals in the U.S. and has been Greater Cincinnati's preferred hospital for the last 15 years. The Christ Hospital network has one main hospital facility, in addition to more than 20 primary care physician offices, more than 15 testing centers and over 20 cardiovascular physician offices. During this one-hour session, you'll learn how all these facilities connect and how they transfer knowledge and information to ensure the best possible patient care.

The IT department knew that physicians were frustrated that not all patient information was available at their primary source – the Epic EMR. They still needed to go back to paper to get the full patient record. In administrative departments, staff couldn’t get everything they needed from the Lawson system they worked in everyday. Not only that, Aspirus also wanted to make sure they were prepared when a RAC auditor came knocking on the door. The IT department wanted to solve all of these problems with a single, scalable solution.

Assembling a full-scale, workable electronic health record system is like solving a puzzle. There are multiple pieces, variables and options to coordinate. System designers at Sentara Healthcare in Norfolk, Va., faced this situation in 2003 when they embarked on their own EHR quest. Ultimately, the team decided on a comprehensive, integrated solution and not a single-source technology to meet their needs. The result: Roughly $34.5 million in business savings and benefits in 2009.

Providers today recognize that even the most powerful EMRs can't handle the content that exists outside of the patient record. Unstructured, ancillary documents and content related to patient care – paper, forms, faxes, graphics, photos and other clinical images – is often disconnected from electronic records. For Sentara Healthcare, access to accurate, timely and complete patient information is instrumental to increasing quality and service of care, and enterprise content management (ECM) is a vital part of that enterprise EHR strategy.

One of the country’s leading healthcare systems, University Hospitals (UH) provides quality medical care throughout the Northeastern Ohio region. With the different technology initiatives being implemented throughout the healthcare system, the IT department’s role is to help improve the clinician experience. The challenge that UH faced was how to incorporate technology to digitalize paper within the enterprise. Read this case study to learn how UH is moving toward making the EDM system an enterprise-wide solution that will support other departments and organizations.