Write 400–600 words that respond to the following questions with your thoughts, ideas, and comments. Be substantive and clear, and use examples to reinforce your ideas.

CTO Health Care Systems has five clinics that serve nearly 2 million residents in a large metropolitan area and that treat over 500,000 patients annually. Now that you have successfully implemented the electronic health record (EHR) at the main facility, it is time to integrate the clinic’s information technology (IT) with the main hospital’s EHR. In preparation for the implementation of an EHR system for the five clinics, the healthcare system implemented an electronic document (ED) and content management (CM) system to handle the imaging, indexing, and storage of selected hard-copy documents from active patient paper medical records so that in the future, to support continuity of care needs, key documents would be retrievable through the EHR system. However, the healthcare system lacked the level of internal IT and health information services that staff resources required to manage the implementation of hardware and software to handle the actual paper conversion process, so these aspects of the project were outsourced.

Discuss the following:

• As the healthcare system prepares to select an outsource company as its vendor for this project, what types of information should you gather from each vendor under consideration?
• What are the potential benefits that a healthcare system could gain from implementing a document imaging and management project prior to implementing an EHR system?