Iron Mountain urges CMS to expand meaningful use criteria
Iron Mountain has called on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to expand its proposed rules for meaningful use of EHRs so that healthcare providers would be eligible to receive federal subsidies for digitizing paper records and scrubbing patient databases.
Missing from CMS’s initial proposal are key first steps like scanning physical records and cleaning out patient databases, which providers must do to implement EHR successfully, according to the Boston-based information management services company.
Iron Mountain manages paper and digital healthcare information for more than 2,000 hospitals across 43 states. It has helped more than 100 hospitals make the switch from paper to electronic records.
“If a hospital has poor processes for storing and managing hard-copy medical records, simply digitizing them will only add to the mess, not help solve it,” said Ken Rubin, vice president and general manager of healthcare for Iron Mountain. “Health systems that first streamline their paper storage and workflows for handling records not only establish the right framework for EHR, they can also find as much as $1 million in savings to help fund their transition to electronic records.”
The company advised healthcare providers to begin the EHR-conversion process by consolidating and organizing paper records spread across their health system. This initial cleanup should also include improving the quality of Master Patient Index (MPI) data by scrubbing these databases for duplicate records and destroying them, according to the company. These steps can lower storage costs for the organization and provide caregivers with faster, more accurate access to a patient’s complete medical history and records, Iron Mountain claimed.
Next, hospitals should comb through their records and destroy duplicates as well as those past their state-mandated retention period. A study from the American Health Information Management Association found that more than half of U.S. hospitals keep medical records forever, Iron Mountain said. Destroying these outdated files and redundant copies cuts storage costs and makes digitization more cost-effective.
To reduce costs further, Iron Mountain recommended hospitals only digitize records on a go-forward basis and do so according to the patient’s medical history, rather than spending limited budgets to image all records.
Missing from CMS’s initial proposal are key first steps like scanning physical records and cleaning out patient databases, which providers must do to implement EHR successfully, according to the Boston-based information management services company.
Iron Mountain manages paper and digital healthcare information for more than 2,000 hospitals across 43 states. It has helped more than 100 hospitals make the switch from paper to electronic records.
“If a hospital has poor processes for storing and managing hard-copy medical records, simply digitizing them will only add to the mess, not help solve it,” said Ken Rubin, vice president and general manager of healthcare for Iron Mountain. “Health systems that first streamline their paper storage and workflows for handling records not only establish the right framework for EHR, they can also find as much as $1 million in savings to help fund their transition to electronic records.”
The company advised healthcare providers to begin the EHR-conversion process by consolidating and organizing paper records spread across their health system. This initial cleanup should also include improving the quality of Master Patient Index (MPI) data by scrubbing these databases for duplicate records and destroying them, according to the company. These steps can lower storage costs for the organization and provide caregivers with faster, more accurate access to a patient’s complete medical history and records, Iron Mountain claimed.
Next, hospitals should comb through their records and destroy duplicates as well as those past their state-mandated retention period. A study from the American Health Information Management Association found that more than half of U.S. hospitals keep medical records forever, Iron Mountain said. Destroying these outdated files and redundant copies cuts storage costs and makes digitization more cost-effective.
To reduce costs further, Iron Mountain recommended hospitals only digitize records on a go-forward basis and do so according to the patient’s medical history, rather than spending limited budgets to image all records.