How to streamline healthcare management with SharePoint
Healthcare is a vast industry, a multifaceted sector that deals with an enormous amount of information including medical records, patient details, financial reports, staff details, etc. There is no doubt that the healthcare industry is transforming every day with the latest advents in technology and its implementation in the sector. And the incorporation of Microsoft SharePoint in healthcare is the latest addition to the list.
Microsoft SharePoint is one of the most promising solutions to address a lot of challenges faced by healthcare professionals. It streamlines all the organizational processes and helps medical practitioners to provide better care to patients.
The healthcare sector also faces challenges in choosing the right software platform as all the software platforms are not considered HIPAA compliant. Also, the top management in healthcare looks for a technology solution that would help the industry to:
- Minimize cost
- Save time
- Improve information access
- Enable information exchange
- Abide by the regulations
And since SharePoint is HIPAA compliant, it is one of the best choices for them. The use of SharePoint in the healthcare industry has immense potential to streamline and automate inefficient processes. It can improve the quality of patient care and transform operational processes to be more cost-effective.
Let’s take a look at the advantages of SharePoint for the healthcare sector in detail:
Better collaboration
SharePoint helps you to create an intranet for your employees. It enables your employees to access the intranet from any system to work and collaborate. SharePoint also helps you to create a portal for patients to connect with their doctors. This makes it easy for both patients and doctors to access their information like medical records, test results, etc.
SharePoint enables healthcare professionals to share medical records with their colleagues and consultants securely. SharePoint incorporation enables you to keep a patient-centric approach. It makes creating a value-based healthcare system easy and enables medical staff to overcome challenges faced by the industry.
Moreover, SharePoint allows project administrators to create dashboards for all the partners and customize them as per their requirements for a better user experience.
Automated workflows
Just like every other industry, healthcare organizations rely on numerous manual processes like registration, documenting, keeping files, processing and maintaining records, etc. These processes are tedious and time-consuming. These are important operations but consume a lot of time that can be better utilized in providing services to patients.
SharePoint has amazing built-in templates and clause libraries to handle such problems efficiently. Medical staff can make use of these templates and libraries to manage all the aforesaid documentation and collaborate easily. This not only streamlines tedious processes but also helps in adhering to regulatory compliance.
You can track processes from anywhere, at any time, using any device. Automating workflow with SharePoint helps you to improve communication among team members and increases process efficiency.
Therefore, SharePoint saves a lot of time by automating manual processes and frees your staff to focus on patient care.
Structured document management
Today, healthcare is struggling to manage the massive amount of confidential information and medical records that it receives daily. Here, SharePoint comes as a savior. It enables healthcare facilities to create a central repository to store and maintain patient records.
SharePoint also has a search feature that helps users to look for any required document throughout all the integrated systems using keywords or the name of a patient, etc.
You can also manage whom to give access to what and classify the roles of your team members depending upon their job requirements for document access and editing. As stated above, your team members can share and exchange medical records with the treating doctors and others securely and provide better care to patients.
Managing permission
Permission management is among the best features of SharePoint. It helps you to limit user access and create a safe and secure environment. You can also define roles for different functions related to document access like downloading or editing as required.
SharePoint has a security management user permissions function. This function helps you to define rules to make sure that your team manages all the documents safely and securely.
As a healthcare provider, it becomes mandatory for you to maintain the privacy and security of all crucial and confidential information. Handling security issues consume a lot of time, energy and resources. But SharePoint helps you to minimize this load by maintaining the safety and security of your systems.
On the other hand, SharePoint ensures that you stay compliant with all the rules and regulations defined by the health industry which even includes HIPAA.
Security and privacy
Microsoft has developed SharePoint and Office 365 keeping all the necessary rules and regulations in consideration. So, when an industry chooses to incorporate them, particularly healthcare, they don’t have to worry about noncompliance at all. As a healthcare organization, you can trust SharePoint because Microsoft has taken special care of all your security and privacy concerns.
Apart from this, an Advanced Security Management of SharePoint has the potential to identify sensitive information when some data is uploaded. It then sends intimation to end-users to check the process and take necessary actions, either to block or allow it.
Go ahead with SharePoint
SharePoint is a remarkable web-based collaborative platform and an amazing document management and storage system. It is highly configurable and can be easily tailored to cater to the different needs of your organization. As stated in the blog, SharePoint offers numerous capabilities that help you to improve the operational processes of your healthcare organization.
It is always advisable to hire SharePoint developers to build custom solutions for your organization to streamline collaboration, document management, etc. In addition, SharePoint supports your organization to adhere to the regulatory compliance that is mandatory for the healthcare industry. To know more about how using SharePoint for healthcare solutions will benefit your organization, please talk to our experts.
