Could Obama's electronic medical record plan help ECM?

Bex Huff, who is a consultant specializing in Oracle Enterprise Content Management, wonders in a recent blog post if President-elect Obama's recent radio address calling for the modernization of medical record keeping would be a boon for content management vendors. It's Huff's contention that it would be, but I'm not sure this particular aspect of the president-elect's plan would help ECM specifically. It could certainly help related industries around scanning and pure document management.

The record itself, the basic data about you as a patient, tends to be structured data, which can be handled in a database, but the pieces that go with your records such as x-rays and aspects of the record that are not yet electronic that need to be scanned could be handled by document management vendors. There is also a business process related to any medical facility, whether it be a family practice or a large medical group, and using content management work flow engines could help move the content from one workstation to the next.

It's clear, as I've written here before (see "From the ashes of the economic meltdown, ECM could thrive [1]"), there will be ample opportunity for ECM vendors as Congress crafts stricter regulations in exchange for all of the money it is giving to various industries to keep them afloat. These and other situations in the coming years could help ECM and related industries continue to do well, even if the economy continues to flounder.

For more information:
- see Huff's blog post [2]

Related Articles:
Obama to put money and muscle behind IT [3]
From the ashes of the economic meltdown, ECM could thrive [1]
Bad diagnosis for e-medical records [4]
Barack Obama news from FierceCIO [5]