Geisinger Recognized by AIIM with Industry Best Practice Award for HIPAA-Compliant Solution
International authority on enterprise content management recognizes use of newly acquired Vignette technology to consolidate and manage patient information

Mar. 31, AUSTIN, TX —  Vignette Corp. today announced that Geisinger Health System received The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) Best Practices Award 2004 for its use of Vignette-Integrated Document Management solutions, formerly TOWER IDM, to create a comprehensive HIPAA-compliant system which manages the entire medical record of its patients.

With its use of Vignette Integrated Document Management solutions, Geisinger Health System consolidates structured and unstructured information and provides secure access to 600 physicians and 8,000 Geisinger staff from over 40 clinics.

As the volume of patient data mushroomed, Geisinger recognized early on the clear need for a single system to centralize and manage information across its distributed enterprise. With a goal of helping to transform Geisinger into a paperless environment, scalability and support for of all types of content were key requirements. In order to better meet HIPAA requirements, Geisinger based its system on a comprehensive definition of patient records, including patient photos, cardiogram video clips, electronic reports from medical lab systems, benefits statements, claims forms, patient survey forms, email and more. Vignette Integrated Document Management offered the imaging, report management and workflow capabilities necessary to maintain and manage medical records.

“Geisinger was in a position to easily conform to HIPAA guidelines thanks to the strength of auditing and logging in the Vignette Integrated Document Management Solution,” said Geisinger Health System Associate Vice President of Information Technology Dave Macko. “For any function we complete, a non-reputable audit trail is created and stored in the system. Another key benefit is secure, simple access by authorized caregivers to these patient files, records and images.”

Vignette Integrated Document Management’s standards-based architecture provided a platform that could evolve to accommodate growth and meet Geisinger’s future business needs. At the time of launch, the deployment was limited to the business office and was based on over 40 million document pages converted from a proprietary, legacy format to a standard compression, allowing the management and exporting of information in its native format. Today, the system has been extended to physicians and support staff in remote clinics, with a total of 4,000 staff members online, and manages almost 400 different data types, from Word documents to digitized slides.

“Geisinger is a model for applying technology to meet real business needs,” said David Shirk, senior vice president of product strategy and worldwide marketing at Vignette. “We are proud of the successes Geisinger has achieved with Vignette solutions and look forward to working with them to help evolve their IT initiatives with Vignette’s broad suite of capabilities.”

Geisinger is enhancing the current system to enable true document collaboration with version control, check-in and check-out, and email capture and intends to migrate all digital assets to the Vignette Integrated Document Management framework. Additionally, Geisinger has plans to extend the Vignette-based system to serve Geisinger Health Plan, a 260,000-subscriber health insurance plan.

AIIM announced the winners of the “AIIM Best Practices Award” at the AIIM 2004 Conference & Exhibition. The AIIM Best Practices Award recognizes excellence in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) field. The term "Best Practice" denotes a standard of excellence that has been achieved within an organization and refers to a process that can be quantified, adapted, and repeated. Award recipients are selected by AIIM’s Emerging Technology Advisory Group, which chooses companies they believe demonstrate the vision, leadership, creative use of technology, business value, and return on investment that are the hallmarks of Best Practices award winners.