How To Tame The Chaos Of Managing Digital Assets In Healthcare

Communicating is easy, right? By age 4 or 5, children can express their feelings, use adult grammar and tell stories that stay on topic.

Of course, those stories rarely involve healthcare or rely on linked digital assets. And they never need to be vetted by marketing, legal, compliance, the CMO, the CEO or the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. If you work in healthcare or pharma, your stories often do, which means you need a better approach.

Consider the familiar process of circulating a document via email for review, a process many U.S. companies still follow. The author attaches the draft document to a new message, manually selects a dozen or more recipients and clicks send. Then, the email ping-pong begins. Some people return edited documents as attachments, often with untracked changes and cryptic filenames. Others send their edits in the body of an email or a Slack message. Still others forget to respond. The author must track down late reviews, collate countless, often contradictory edits, search through long email chains for comments and ensure that all required approvals are in hand.

But documents are only part of the problem. Organizations must also manage other digital assets, including images, videos and audio files. They must give access to both internal and external users who need different levels of permission. And they must protect sensitive data, such as protected health information.

Consider what happens when you’re developing a biological license application (BLA) that can run to more than 10 million pages and include multiple assets created at different sites over a period of years. The process is slow, inefficient, insecure and error-prone and it adds no value to the organization.

There has to be a better way.

Actually, there is. A workflow-centric digital asset management (DAM) system can help you end the chaos and start focusing on the people you’re serving instead of the assets you’re managing.

“This doesn’t simply mean porting a broken process from email to Slack or Microsoft Teams,” says Florian Kirschner, Managing Director of Fabasoft Xpublisher. “Instead, it means taking a fresh approach to a daunting problem.”

Here’s what a cloud-based DAM system like the Fabasoft Xpublisher solution can offer:

• Security: Assets are housed in a secure, centralized repository that features encryption and automated backups. The organization grants granular access rights to individual users, teams and roles, ensuring authorized personnel can only access the assets that are relevant for them. Audit trails and comprehensive documentation create full transparency.
• Information management and transparency: Instead of storing conflicting versions of an asset across multiple systems, you have a single, easily accessible source of truth. This allows for real-time collaboration, automatic tracking of changes and the ability to revert to any previous version at any time.
• Standardization and collaboration: Workflows are built into the system. You can easily make role/team assignments, automate repetitive tasks with enterprise-secure AI and track workflow progress and approvals automatically instead of facing time-consuming coordination, communication and escalation efforts.
• Compliance and regulation: Compliance and regulatory requirements are built into the workflow, ensuring that no step is overlooked. Consistent documentation provides an audit trail that confirms compliance with the strictest internal and external requirements.

The best DAM systems offer a host of features, some of which are essential and some of which are simply nice to have. Markus Däubler, Lead Marketing Manager of Fabasoft Xpublisher, encourages customers to look for these features:

1. The ability to easily model and enforce best-practices workflows, assign deadlines and drive efficiency
2. The ability of users to work at any time from anywhere via the web, iOS or Android
3. The ability to let coworkers and clients securely access files of any size
4. The ability to easily configure roles and responsibilities so you have granular control over who can view and/or edit digital assets
5. Maintenance of an online asset that’s always accessible in its most current version with all changes traceable
6. A “time travel” feature that lets you review edits and access any previous version
7. The ability to configure metadata that provides context and facilitates findability and reusability
8. A smart search feature that lets you find relevant assets in seconds
9. Integrated digital signature functionality
10. A software-as-a-service (SaaS) approach that reduces your IT burden

“DAM systems let your organization spend less time managing digital assets and more time achieving your mission,” Däubler says.

Whether you’re developing a specialist article, an 8-page newsletter or an 8-million-page BLA, your message is important. By using a workflow-centric DAM system, you can ensure that that message is delivered on time with 100% accuracy and all approvals in place.

To learn more about digital asset management, visit Fabasoft Xpublisher, a leader in the field of cloud-based digital asset management and multichannel publishing, offering products that enable workflow-centric content creation, content management in a content pool and automated publishing to virtually any media platform. Since its inception in 2009, numerous leading international companies and organizations in the healthcare, pharma, publishing, manufacturing, aerospace, technology, education and public administration sectors have placed their trust in Fabasoft Xpublisher products.