The second set of meetings for the project centred around the component piece that will manage our policies and procedures. Currently we have approximately 5000+ pieces of paper (I think) that represent our P & P within the hospital.
This has little focus within my position (nor do I want it to) but I did want to sit on the meeting to see what our LMS vendor was going to do for us and how the new document management system will help our organization’s processes.
The process for implementation of this system will begin with the importing of all the current documents we have. The plan is to use text recognition software to scan in and capture the policies and procedures. If that does not work someone will have to manually recreate them (NOT ME!).
The system, once we get using it and set up our lines of policy approval, will then track a new policy, procedure, form, or other document from Author, to a DMS (document management specialist), to several committees and their members for consultation, then different approving bodies for final publishing. Documents online will be the current version while printed copies will have water marks on them notifying the user that is it not a current/working version. The system will also notify users of up coming documents that are up for review.
We are greatly aspiring that this new tool will allow us to have only the most current of documentation “floating around”, will essentially eliminate the “floating around” notion and there will be one central location to find the files, that anyone can access them at any time, and that new policies or procedures do not take months/years to get approved.
Once again it will be great to see how this truly works in action.