Headquartered in Westlake, Ohio, Hyland Software is a global company with more than 11,800 customers in 63 countries, including 5,000 healthcare facilities. Its key product is OnBase, a document management or Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution. We caught up with Hyland’s Vice President for Healthcare Sales and Services, Susan deCathelineau who highlights the partnerships at the heart of Hyland’s work, both internally and with its customers. The company believes that OnBase solutions need to be easy to install, intuitive to use and straightforward to expand. It has used these principles to drive the development of the solution since its inception in 1991.
Future flexible
OnBase electronically captures and centralises important business content in one secure location. It quickly drives content through processes, integrates with other applications and delivers relevant information when and where it’s needed. Organisations can see exactly what is happening with their processes, documents and information at all times.
OnBase is also ‘future flexible’: it can grow, evolve and expand as needs change. In particular, organisations can ‘start small’, and expand the system later to cover the whole organisation. The crucial aspect is that organisations have control over their data and documents, now and in future. OnBase is particularly useful in adding structure to unstructured content. It can even be tailored for individual departments. The direct advantage that organisations see from using OnBase is that they are able to connect information and systems to accelerate and evolve processes. However, the indirect advantages include reductions in operating costs, improved customer service, and reduction in risks from audits, litigation and disasters.
Diverse customers
Given its nearly 12,000 customers around the world, Hyland has plenty of success stories to share. The Cleveland Clinic uses OnBase to integrate clinical content including results, photos, paper charts, forms, and insurance information. OnBase is one of the most important systems at the Cleveland Clinic, critical because of the information it provides to clinicians. Before implementing, the Cleveland Clinic collaborated with other large health systems using OnBase and the Epic EPR to learn best practice. Two key lessons have emerged: centralised scanning improves quality and reduces costs, and creating a governance committee is important to establishing enterprise standards and prioritising projects.
And on the other side of the world, Mothers2mothers (m2m) is a non-governmental organisation that empowers mothers and helps prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV in seven countries in Africa. M2m uses an HP and OnBase solution to electronically fill out questionnaires in the field or quickly scan them into OnBase at the main office using HP scanners. All the information in OnBase is securely available to Mentor Mothers from their mobile phones. The solution started with 29 staff members and has grown to include nearly 100 users.
Culture of innovation
Hyland is clearly proud of OnBase, and its ability to support clinicians in providing high quality care, as well as its capacity to integrate with other systems and evolve. However, what comes across most clearly is Hyland’s pride in its culture and ways of working. It’s not just the way in which Hyland treats its customers as partners, although that is clearly important, with ‘customer delight’ being a key issue for the company. Hyland’s goal around innovation is to help customers realise the long-term value of their ECM technology investment, and it has used customer feedback to make over 8,750 improvements to OnBase since 2009. Hyland reinvests more than 15% of its revenue annually into the R&D of OnBase to turn ideas into solutions.
Hyland was one of the first ECM vendors to deploy solutions in the cloud. The OnBase Cloud offering can be hosted or software-as-a-service (SaaS) and delivers the same functionality whether in cloud or not. There are over 550 OnBase Cloud customers in 25 countries, including ROM Reinsurance who used it to support clients after Superstorm Sandy. Hyland was also the first mobile ECM vendor to develop a mobile platform, so that users can instantly access all the information they need, make business decisions, receive notifications and monitor the status of critical processes.
Looking ahead
OnBase helps healthcare organisations to focus on patient experience and patient safety. The ability to organise information and provide instant access to it is crucial in ensuring that patients get the care they need, and improves outcomes. With OnBase’s scalability and adaptability, it is potentially a very powerful tool for healthcare systems and organisations.