Welcome to the Perceptive Software Community, where customers, partners and employees share ideas and connect.
On the Community, you’ll find the Perceptive Software Blog featuring insights and authoritative commentary on all aspects of process and content management, and business efficiency. The Community is also home to the Regional User Groups, which are designed to connect users in similar areas around the globe. Learn more about the RUGs and view upcoming meetings.
Make sure to sign in to the Community before you navigate to the groups and forums you are interested in. Please take note that your Community login is separate from your Customer Portal login, so if you don’t have a Community login yet, simply register to create an account. Once you’re signed in, you can request membership in the particular groups you’d like to interact with, and start connecting with fellow users.
I’m an Okie. As my home state of Oklahoma begins to recover from the devastation caused by Monday’s E-F5 tornado, the financial impact remains unclear. As the recovery aspect gets underway, adjusters will begin to assess the damage, and those most affected will wait – I know, I experienced this before.
In May of 2011, the storm system that spawned the Joplin, MO tornado hit my parent’s home. While my parents were extremely lucky (their neighbor lost everything), they still had tens of thousands of dollars in damage. It was an emotional time, and the insurance claims process didn’t help. As my family worked to clean up quickly, we waited … and waited … and waited on our carrier to help. The service we received (or didn’t) caused so much frustration and negative emotion. My dad was quick to let the company know their response time was too long, but by then the damage was done – both literally and figuratively.
What if you, as an insurance company, could improve the customer claims experience, even while thousands of urgent claims are coming in? How do you know what to change in your workflow or process? Leveraging Perceptive technologies like Process Mining and Process Design, you can understand your claims process before it’s too late.
Perceptive Software’s process and content management solutions for insurance gives claims examiners instant access to the materials they need to provide timely service to customers, while integrating with core applications. Our easy-to-use workflow allows you to automate standard claims while building in business rules that identify and escalate complex claims.
We don’t have the technology to avoid natural disasters like tornadoes, hurricanes or floods. But we DO have the technology to make the insurance claims process easier on those whose lives are affected or devastated in the wake of these disasters. Isn’t it our responsibility to implement it?
Attend the Business Intelligence and Analytics Vendor Connect Tour at IASA 2013 to see how Perceptive Solutions can improve your processes.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel released a memo on May 21st 2013 (obtained by NextGov.com) that commits the Department of Defense (DoD) to begin a competitive process to secure a commercial off-the-shelf (or COTS) electronic medical records (EMR) system for the purpose of delivering care to active duty military personnel and their families. This decision has been received with a mix of joy and animosity. EMR vendors see it as the DoD moving from an unsupportable, radically expensive, homegrown EMR system to an interoperable, scalable, commercial EMR system that the best healthcare institutions in the United States use to provide care. The Veteran’s Administration (VA), however, sees it as a damaging move that could lead the public to question their decision to stay with the homegrown Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) EMR system.
This decision announced by the DoD comes right on the heels of the DoD/VA iEHR and HIE summit, held May 15-16. I had the opportunity to attend the summit, right outside of Washington DC in beautiful Alexandria, VA. The atmosphere of the conference was energetic, and attendees were eager to glean some information from DoD leadership on their leanings toward the upcoming ‘build or buy’ decision. Unfortunately for attendees, moderators maintained a high degree of control over questions that would identify any commitment on the part of the DoD on whether they would continue with their AHLTA EMR system. However, there was also a sense of apprehension and uncertainty at the conference. It felt like the VA had limited representation. They may have made the decision to not attend because they decided to stay with the VistA platform, it may have been out of protest, or it may have been by design to focus more on the decision by the Secretary of Defense – which was already past due. This apprehension and uncertainty manifested itself on the morning of the 16th, when a large stone came crashing through one of the double-paned safety windows at the United Way building where the conference was being held. While attendees and conference workers were understandably startled, thankfully no one was seriously injured.
Interestingly enough, I was able to talk to a few different EMR vendors that attended the show and their comments mirrored the message delivered by the speakers at the conference: This is about taking care of the people that take care of us. Delivering interoperable, supportable systems to facilitate a virtual lifetime electronic health record that is able to follow the patient from active duty in the DoD system to non-active duty in the VA system. One of the EMR vendors went as far as to say, “I don’t even care if they choose us or one of our competitors, but they have to do something different. The current systems are not meeting the needs of our troops.”
Where does this decision by the DoD to move to a commercial EMR system leave us – and more importantly, our service men and women? I feel it is a step in the right direction, but there is still a ton of work to do. Health record information which is stored in ALHTA will still need to be accessed in the new EMR solution for the DoD and by the VA in VistA. Content in the form of clinical images, scanned documents, digital photos and other unstructured data are stored in multiple systems. All of this information will need to reach a state of liquidity to be accessed on demand and stored and managed efficiently and effectively. There needs to be a unified content platform working in conjuncture with interoperable EMR systems to deliver all patient information at the point of need to ensure the best possible health outcomes for our active and inactive military personnel and their families. As Secretary of Defense Hagel stated in his memo, “It is important we get this right -- for those who serve and have served our nation.”
As individuals, we learn early on that it’s better to nurture and concentrate our efforts on a smaller number of hobbies, relationships and goals rather than stretch ourselves too thin. By trying to take on everything under the sun, we effectively resign ourselves to being less-than-our-best at each one. In most instances, it’s much more effective to not try to be all things to all people. But what if, as a business, you risk losing valuable market share by choosing to concentrate only on your core offerings? Your core business unit can’t always sustain all solutions and offerings, even if your customers demand them of you. That’s when a business partner can become a huge asset.
When you choose a partner to help support the gaps in your business offerings, you add value and expertise, reduce implementation time frames, lower the cost of services and consume less of your client’s procurement budgets – benefits that both you and your customers can appreciate.
But how do you determine which partner is going to best support your goals, your customers, and your business model?
By choosing the right partner and continuously nurturing that relationship, you can leverage both companies’ positions and expertise, take advantage of established platforms and resources, and decrease valuable time-to-market for your customers. While it may not be feasible to try to be all things to all people, the right partnerships can help your company be everything it can to your customers.
Perceptive Software partners tell us that their relationships with us have significantly increased their potential to penetrate new markets and gain new customers while increasing business with their existing customer base. Because Perceptive invests significant resources in a select number of strategic partners worldwide, committed partners can count on the highest level of support in the form of personal guidance, demand generation campaigns and tools, marketing funds, and training and technical resources. Click to learn more about our global partner program or email us at partner.channel@perceptivesoftware.com.
Perceptive Software's Acuo Technologies was honored by Axeda with a product innovation award for its AcuoINSIGHT solution. The award was presented to Imad Nijim and Joe Knight of Acuo at Axeda’s Connexion 2013 conference in Boston earlier this week. Connexion is a global gathering of hundreds of Axeda customers, partners and industry leaders at the forefront of the connected product and machine-to-machine (M2M) revolution.
AcuoINSIGHT is an integrated, customer-facing VNA performance environment and dashboard built on the Axeda platform. AcuoINSIGHT enables organizations to effectively monitor VNA system and application health. It is cloud-based, delivered via the Web and optimized for cross-platform use, including the ability to adapt to smaller screen sizes of mobile devices (see AcuoInsight screen captures below).
Joe Knight led the Acuo team in building AcuoINSIGHT. The photo below shows Joe and Imad receiving the award from Axeda President Todd DeSisto and Jeff Melvin, Axeda’s EVP of Sales. Congratulations to the entire Acuo team for this outstanding accomplishment. For more info on AcuoINSIGHT, visit http://www.acuotech.com/products/universal-clinical-platform/life-cycle-management or contact Acuo Technologies. For more information on Axeda, visit www.axeda.com.
By Mark Bowen
Without a doubt, the world of enterprise content management (ECM) is changing, growing and evolving. Until recently, enterprise content management and document management were almost synonyms. Essentially, the criteria to become an ”ECM vendor” consisted of a simple slogan: “have scanner, will travel.” Well, unfortunately for those companies, having a scanner in a quick draw holster isn’t meeting the enterprise content needs of today’s healthcare organizations. Those organizations are demanding more. And they should demand more.
Looking back at the PACS and EMR market, at one time these vendors created stand-alone applications all with their own middleware and databases. Healthcare organizations would buy best-of-breed solutions and then patch them together with a spider web of interfaces to simulate integration and were forced to manage the data in individual silos. Then healthcare organizations began to demand vendors provide an enterprise architecture with a common data repository to manage all discrete patient data, and now every competitive vendor delivers their solutions on an integrated platform.
This is where ECM is today. Unstructured content is shackled in departmental PACS, audio and video systems and on digital camera and file shares. How can we not learn from the maturity process that PACS and EMR vendors went through and provide a unified content platform to capture, manage and access all forms of content? Well, the only way to do this is by supplementing traditional ECM systems with vendor neutral archive (VNA) technology to create an evolved enterprise content management system to manage all forms of unstructured content. This creates a single enterprise content repository for all content residing outside the EMR, including PACS/medical imaging.
Back to my original point: so… you call yourself an ECM vendor? Can you manage all forms of content, from any source, in a common integrated enterprise repository? I thought not. Holster that scanner, get back on your horse and get outta town. There’s a new sheriff in town and he’s delivering an integrated ECM+VNA platform for true enterprise content management to meet the needs of the ever-evolving healthcare market.