A document management system (DMS) is used by various industries to store, manage and track electronic documents and reduce paper use. However, before using a document management system, it is essential to convert all paper documents into electronic files. Partnering with experienced document scanning companies helps scan and convert your paper documents into digital formats. Every industry benefits by implementing DMS, as it reduces storage space, enhances security, improves regulatory compliance, helps in easier retrieval, better collaboration, and data backup and disaster recovery.
- Healthcare Industry – Healthcare organizations have to deal with a lot of paperwork everyday. These include patient forms, insurance approvals, diagnosis reports, consent forms, identification, payment confirmations, prescriptions, compliance documents, surgery reports etc. Physicians have to retain patient medical records, including those of deceased patients, for a minimum of 10 years from the date of the patient’s last visit. Hospitals and clinics are also required to comply with similar policies. Gradually, this can lead to accumulation of a lot of records and paper. So, to search for one paper, physicians, hospitals or clinics will have to go through piles of documents. With a good document management system (DMS), they can retrieve the documents at a click, instead of going through the file cabinets. Other benefits that healthcare businesses can enjoy by implementing document management system include:
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- Paper documents that are scanned using DMS can be indexed and attached to either an existing electronic patient record or otherwise a new one can be created.
- Helps increase productivity.
- Helps in reducing adverse drug events, such as improper dosage of medications; this in turn helps increase patient safety and protects physicians from potential regulatory and legal sanctions.
- Reduces the cost of physical storage space and the cost of paper
- Eliminates the need to hire extra staff, which reduces operation costs
- DMSs are relatively cost-effective compared to more sophisticated EMR systems. They can be used as an alternative system to an EMR.
- Allows physicians and administrators to focus more on patient care and value-added activities.
- Helps increase patient satisfaction
- Allows administrators to monitor record activity and ensure security and compliance with audit trails
- A DMS can be easily integrated into most office systems, enabling physicians and administrators to eliminate the need to spend valuable time on training for a new system.
- Reduces the risk of damage due to fire, flood, and natural disasters such as severe storms.
- Allows documents to be retrieved and modified by a user while access is denied to others when that particular document is being used. This in turn reduces duplicates and old versions of content to be kept in the system. DMS has collaboration features that allow multiple users to view and alter a document at the same time.
- Education Industries – Educational institutions such as schools, colleges and universities have to manage large quantities of paperwork including admissions, facilities management, health and safety, course work, HR forms, student records and Ofsted reports. DMS captures and stores information in a central document pool, thereby allowing educational industries to efficiently manage their documents and document processes. DMS allows your documents to be quickly and easily retrieved from anywhere, anytime and from any platform. DMS allows you to easily set up and manage security, auditing, version control and retention policies. This in turn ensures that regulatory compliance is maintained and confidential documents are only accessed by those with the authority to view them. DMS helps the education sector to reduce costs, increase efficiency, speed up access to information and improve collaboration. Other benefits of implementing DMS in educational sector includes
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- Helps free up space used to store documents
- Secures confidential information
- Back up the documents as part of a disaster recovery plan
- Helps educational sectors to comply with regulatory bodies and retention policies
- Enhances collaboration
- Government Institutions – The confidential data regarding the citizens or contracts must be secured and also access must be restricted at various levels. This sensitive information must be protected against natural calamities or unfavorable human intervention. The confidential documents go through many deliberations like manager reviews and approvals as per hierarchy and thus multiple changes are affected on the drafts till a final version is confirmed. Hence, these changes must be recorded and maintained. These documents have to be retrieved for scrutiny or for reference in various situations. Therefore, the documents need to be stored in such a way that they can be retrieved in quick time to enable governments to provide quality service to the citizens. The confidential documents may be spread across various departments or locations according to who created it, accessed it, or edited it and where its need originated. These documents must be stored in such a way that they should be easily tracked and accessed. These documents need to be available at a central location and must be archived for a very long time.
By implementing document management system, the government can provide improved and efficient services to their citizens. DMS allows governments to create, manage, and store their documents while retaining confidentiality and authenticity. In addition, DMS provides a single point of access, thereby making accessing critical information quick and simple. DMS allows government agencies to modernize, experience higher levels of efficiency and keep records secure. DMS helps in speedy information retrieval, reduces the cost of storage, and improves the efficiency of government processes. DMS helps government agencies, records managers and staff to immediately search and retrieve government documents to research and make faster decisions. With DMS, inquiries and requests for information can be responded to quickly, space used for paper file storage can be freed for other government business, record policies can be defined to ensure regulations, and government policies and certain document-centric administrative tasks in HR and accounting can be automated. DMS helps manage your documents and reduce reliance on paper and conventional methods of document distribution such as shipping and courier. It can also help you manage, store, and protect documents related to the operations of government. DMS eliminates the need for physical storage and provides a great digital environment to work in. DMS helps save time and money, allows processes to flow smoother, and allows government employees to focus more on their jobs as civil servants instead of filing away paperwork.
Transportation and manufacturing industries can also benefit by implementing document management systems. All these industries run better when their paper and processes are digitized. Partnering with a document scanning company helps scan and convert paper-based documents into digital format. A reliable document scanning service provider implements document management system and workflow system to track these scanned documents and manage them efficiently.
