Half of doctors and medical facilities in the U.S. and one-third of America’s adult population rely on Quest Diagnostics Inc. for diagnostic information and clinical lab results. The company also provides ChartMaxx Enterprise Content Management (ECM), a robust enterprise content and document management system.
What began as an electronic patient record application now includes electronic forms and non-clinical and back-office processes. Hosted at more than 330 hospital and ambulatory locations, ChartMaxx helps diverse users drive efficiencies, reduce costs, and treat patients. The solution’s breadth of experience, integration, workflow automation, and seamless connectivity with other systems enables it to compete formidably against OnBase and Lexmark Perceptive content management software.
Quest Diagnostics stores some 3.4 billion documents for more than 52 million patients in ChartMaxx ECM. Healthcare providers reach these documents via metadata. While ChartMaxx provides the ability to index and store documents, the company sought to satisfy a customer need: deep-dive searches by concept into structured and unstructured data.
“We needed a solution that would allow our customers to utilize the ChartMaxx technology better,” says Daniel Schlake, the company’s Strategic Accounts Director for ChartMaxx.
Quest Diagnostics considered other companies’ products but chose the Micro Focus IDOL data analytics engine because it was cost-effective and capable of meeting myriad search requirements in healthcare. After assistance with a proof of concept from Micro Focus, Quest Diagnostics launched a customer pilot program.
“We selected Micro Focus IDOL to give us the capability to get into the content of the documents we store,” Schlake notes.
Quest Diagnostics customers will benefit from new context-based searching capabilities for their ChartMaxx documents. (One customer spins financial data regarding patient care quality.) Previously, employees only had access to metadata, but now they can employ their ChartMaxx content to discover information more comprehensively.
For some customers, the solution will help demystify decisions and enable content-driven workflows. Schlake explains, “They will be able to make decisions based on document content.” For example, a medical facility may use ChartMaxx to store invoices, but manual intervention is still necessary for payment processing. Schlake notes that IDOL can discover this invoice content, such as vendor names, line items, descriptions and amounts billed. Then, the financial department can create workflows to route the invoice automatically based on rules, amounts, and approvals.
“We’re able to use the IDOL technology to save time and eliminate some of those manual steps in paying invoices,” Schlake says.
ChartMaxx also handles patient document releases for legal purposes. In the past, to safeguard against unauthorized, accidental release of health information to a court or insurance company, employees would manually review numerous pages of files to verify they were distributing information on the right patient. The indexing capabilities of IDOL will help determine that the right patient information is released, and that no data is associated with anyone else. This will ensure compliance with patient privacy regulations.
“This capability has all kinds of value in terms of saving time because some facilities manually review every document. The consequences otherwise are some pretty high penalties,” Schlake notes.
Additionally, ChartMaxx users can flag and redirect content on a patient that also appears in another person’s file, thus improving the quality of information for release and records retention.
The future will find Quest Diagnostics enriching ChartMaxx based on the solution’s expansive features. Schlake acknowledges that the IDOL Natural Language Question Answering function, which allows a user to query and converse with the system as if they were interacting with a human being, could enable self-service, firsttier software support for ChartMaxx customers. Additionally, users can easily break down data silos by leveraging IDOL’s broad portfolio of out-of-the-box application connectors. These connectors address data sources (inside and outside the firewall) such as email, collaboration, documents, chats, and social media to provide insights across the entire data environment.
“Because of the large number of connectors Micro Focus IDOL has in its bag, we can expand searches to not only look at ChartMaxx documents but also into other applications. Our applications built on IDOL will allow our customers to mine data to really gain insight. We’ll help them see what they’ve been missing,” Schlake concludes. Learn more at
