The Debate Over Electronic Medical Records

Posted on Jul 20, 2010 in Records Management News

Forbes.com Ed Sper­ling, 07.19.10, 06:00 AM EDT by Ed Sperling

How the rules about elec­tronic med­ical records will change our per­cep­tions about all infor­ma­tion technology.

After more than a year of review, the fed­eral gov­ern­ment has finally released its “mean­ing­ful use” guide­lines for elec­tronic med­ical records. For the health care field this is par­tic­u­larly mean­ing­ful because it’s the first step taken toward adding the kinds of con­sis­tency and effi­ciency through IT that most cor­po­ra­tions take for granted.

Elec­tronic records can elim­i­nate dupli­ca­tion in test­ing, bring together com­plete med­ical his­to­ries, dis­close adverse drug inter­ac­tions, reduce errors in patient care, add trans­parency into a sys­tem that has been largely closed to review, and set forth best prac­tices for treat­ing ill­nesses. The mean­ing­ful use reg­u­la­tions allow hos­pi­tals and physi­cians to recoup their IT invest­ments toward this end, at once both mod­ern­iz­ing an anti­quated health care sys­tem and help­ing to reduce the over­head asso­ci­ated with med­ical care.

All of this makes sense on paper. The whole pur­pose of IT is to improve effi­ciency and make infor­ma­tion more read­ily avail­able to those who are qual­i­fied to receive it. But it’s also about to set off a debate that will likely last years, if not decades, about the trade-offs between effi­ciency and patient care, patients’ rights and what con­sti­tutes ade­quate care. This is the kind of debate that hasn’t taken place out­side of groups like the Amer­i­can Hos­pi­tal Asso­ci­a­tion and the Amer­i­can Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion; it’s now wide open for pub­lic review.

The play­ers in this debate will include lawyers, health care providers, insur­ance com­pa­nies, chief infor­ma­tion offi­cers, chief med­ical infor­ma­tion offi­cers, chief secu­rity offi­cers, tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies, drug com­pa­nies, lob­by­ists and gov­ern­ment and pri­vate over­sight agen­cies and com­mit­tees. They will define the types of records that need to be kept, how that infor­ma­tion is used and by whom, how it should be stored and new ways to uti­lize that infor­ma­tion for improv­ing treat­ment and iden­ti­fy­ing trends.

What’s not read­ily appar­ent, though, is the effect this will have on the rest of the tech­nol­ogy world. Through­out the his­tory of IT there has never been a national debate on how tech­nol­ogy gets applied to prob­lems. Deci­sions typ­i­cally have been made based upon the needs of a par­tic­u­lar com­pany and the capa­bil­i­ties of tech­nol­ogy pro­duc­ers to meet those needs. One size doesn’t fit all, and best prac­tices often are closely guarded secrets.

To be sure, these best prac­tices can be a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage or dis­ad­van­tage, depend­ing upon both short-term and long-term out­comes and how effec­tively tech­nol­ogy is applied. Some com­pa­nies have scored big with tech­nol­ogy. Oth­ers have not. Wit­ness the wide­spread use of com­mod­ity Intel ( IN TC — news — peo­ple )-based servers in the 1990s, which cre­ated mas­sive inte­gra­tion headaches and caused energy use to spike unnec­es­sar­ily. Those prob­lems are only now being addressed through vir­tu­al­iza­tion and out­sourc­ing into clouds.

I’ve seen far too many mis­takes by doc­tors in e.g. send­ing let­ters to other doc­tors. Have had to cor­rect many of these to make sure I would not be dis­ad­van­taged in my own health. So frankly I don’t t.…

While the mean­ing­ful use rules are vague about the exact tech­nol­ogy, over time they’re going to become very clear about the processes involved in stan­dard­iz­ing records so that when a patient vis­its one hos­pi­tal the records can be trans­ferred from another hos­pi­tal or doctor’s office. This will fos­ter debate about tech­nol­ogy prac­tices that have never been out in the open, includ­ing the costs of this tech­nol­ogy, accept­able times for imple­men­ta­tion, upgrade sched­ules, as well as what works best with what and for what purpose.

In the end, mean­ing­ful use will fos­ter mean­ing­ful debate, and that debate will reach well beyond the med­ical field to expose some other closely guarded secrets.

Ed Sper­ling is the edi­tor of sev­eral tech­nol­ogy trade pub­li­ca­tions and has cov­ered tech­nol­ogy for more than 20 years. Con­tact him at esperlin@yahoo.com.

PRESS RELEASE: July 19, 2010, 8:32 a.m. EDT · Recommend · Post: Iron Mountain to Help Hospitals Adopt Electronic Medical Records

Posted on Jul 20, 2010 in Records Management News

New Iron Moun­tain EMR Enable­ment Solu­tion com­bines doc­u­ment scan­ning, file archiv­ing, disaster-recovery ser­vices and con­sult­ing expertise

BOSTON, Jul 19, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Iron Moun­tain Incor­po­rated (IRM 23.28, –0.23, –0.96%) , the infor­ma­tion man­age­ment com­pany, is com­bin­ing its ser­vices for doc­u­ment scan­ning, file archiv­ing, data backup and more into one solu­tion for hos­pi­tals and health­care orga­ni­za­tions con­vert­ing hard­copy patient files into an elec­tronic med­ical record (EMR) sys­tem. The new Iron Moun­tain EMR Enable­ment Solu­tion offers health­care orga­ni­za­tions a com­plete set of tools for dig­i­tiz­ing patient records, archiv­ing elec­tronic files, pro­tect­ing them from dis­as­ter, and then destroy­ing out­dated records.

While EMR sys­tems promise to improve patient care and cut treat­ment costs, health­care orga­ni­za­tions are uncer­tain how to imple­ment dig­i­tal records using exist­ing resources and with­out dis­rupt­ing patient care. The Iron Moun­tain EMR Enable­ment Solu­tion makes the paper-to-EMR tran­si­tion eas­ier and faster for hos­pi­tals by help­ing them iden­tify which records to dig­i­tize and which to destroy. It also helps hos­pi­tals address essen­tial first steps for orga­niz­ing and dig­i­tiz­ing patient infor­ma­tion in advance of adopt­ing an EMR sys­tem and posi­tion­ing them­selves to receive a share of the bil­lions avail­able in fed­eral incen­tives for suc­cess­ful implementation

“Adopt­ing an elec­tronic med­ical record sys­tem is crit­i­cal to pro­vid­ing the high­est stan­dards of patient care,” said Lori P. Jayne, direc­tor of Health Infor­ma­tion Man­age­ment and pri­vacy offi­cer for Lahey Clinic. “As a multi-disciplinary, clinically-focused hos­pi­tal, our chal­lenge is to bridge the gap between paper and elec­tronic records and get the right infor­ma­tion to our care­givers when they need it most. Iron Moun­tain is enabling that access and suc­cess­fully prepar­ing the Clinic for an EMR sys­tem. We have already improved patient care qual­ity as a result of their approach.”

Lis­ten to the pod­cast from Lahey Clinic Direc­tor of Health Infor­ma­tion Man­age­ment and Pri­vacy Offi­cer Lori P. Jayne dis­cuss her organization’s EMR implementation.

The Chal­lenge of Paper to Digital

Most hos­pi­tals have patient records dis­persed across their orga­ni­za­tion or bot­tled up in spe­cific depart­ments. These records are often copied so care­givers can share them across clin­i­cal areas. This pro­duces dis­con­nected inven­to­ries of infor­ma­tion with­out a con­sis­tent man­age­ment process. This is fur­ther com­pli­cated by the tran­si­tion to EMR, which can neces­si­tate main­tain­ing patient infor­ma­tion in both paper and elec­tronic formats.

“Our cur­rent paper-based US health­care sys­tem wastes hun­dreds of bil­lions of dol­lars annu­ally,” writes For­rester Research Prin­ci­pal Ana­lyst Craig le Clair in the inde­pen­dent report, Elec­tronic Med­ical Records Need More To Sup­port “Mean­ing­ful Use” (May 2010). “Trans­form­ing this into a stream­lined 21st cen­tury elec­tronic sys­tem will require mov­ing though stages of matu­rity from paper-based to hybrid envi­ron­ments and ulti­mately to inter­op­er­a­ble EHRs and adop­tion of online per­sonal health records (PHRs) for indi­vid­u­als.” The report also states, “[P]roviders have a great oppor­tu­nity to stream­line oper­a­tional processes. But this requires under­stand­ing the cur­rent state lim­i­ta­tions and devel­op­ing a real­is­tic road map that pri­or­i­tizes processes that can be rea­son­ably achieved.”

Iron Moun­tain has exten­sive exper­tise in help­ing hos­pi­tals and health­care orga­ni­za­tions iden­tify which parts of the patient records to dig­i­tize and make acces­si­ble for treat­ing patients. Iron Moun­tain dig­i­tizes these doc­u­ments, mak­ing sure infor­ma­tion is cap­tured and cat­e­go­rized in the right for­mat for easy inte­gra­tion into an EMR system.

Iron Mountain’s EMR Enable­ment Solu­tion includes a suite of doc­u­ment scan­ning capa­bil­i­ties for deliv­er­ing infor­ma­tion into an EMR sys­tem. Com­bin­ing records stor­age and shred­ding ser­vices with Iron Mountain’s Live­Vault® and the Iron Moun­tain Dig­i­tal Record Cen­ter® for Med­ical Images for the backup and archiv­ing of med­ical data, Iron Mountain’s EMR Enable­ment Solu­tion helps ensure patient infor­ma­tion is read­ily avail­able while also main­tain­ing its secu­rity and com­pli­ance with indus­try and reg­u­la­tory standards.

“It’s no secret that tran­si­tion­ing to an EMR sys­tem is the sin­gle biggest pri­or­ity for the health­care indus­try, but the scope of the tran­si­tion is over­whelm­ing, espe­cially given the vol­ume of records and the fact that many orga­ni­za­tions retain records for­ever,” said Ken Rubin, senior vice pres­i­dent and gen­eral man­ager, Health­care Ser­vices for Iron Moun­tain. “Our goal is to make the tran­si­tion more man­age­able, while reduc­ing the costs and risks of man­ag­ing this infor­ma­tion. We can help them get con­trol over their infor­ma­tion and oper­ate effi­ciently as they tackle this new hybrid world of paper and elec­tronic med­ical records. By intel­li­gently scan­ning new records and imag­ing exist­ing infor­ma­tion as needed, we help cus­tomers reduce their use of paper in a cost effec­tive way. And, because in many cases we already store the paper files, we can imple­ment this in a more prac­ti­cal way.

The Iron Moun­tain EMR Enable­ment Solu­tion includes:

– Day-forward scan­ning of doc­u­ments that remain paper-based, even after con­ver­sion to an EMR system;

– Image on Demand™ capa­bil­i­ties for the con­ver­sion and deliv­ery of med­ical records;

– Back­file scan­ning for cost-effective bulk con­ver­sion of his­tor­i­cal paper records;

– Com­pli­ant and secure cloud-based archiv­ing and disaster-recovery capa­bil­i­ties through Live­Vault (server-based backup) and the Dig­i­tal Record Cen­ter for Med­ical Images (archiv­ing and backup of unstruc­tured data);

– Addi­tional records man­age­ment and secure shred­ding capa­bil­i­ties for paper records;

– Con­sult­ing exper­tise drawn from man­ag­ing hard­copy and dig­i­tal health­care infor­ma­tion for more than 2,000 hos­pi­tals, and scan­ning 10 mil­lion pages per month at more than 80 Iron Moun­tain imag­ing cen­ters through­out the U.S.

For more infor­ma­tion on the Iron Moun­tain EMR Enable­ment Solu­tion, visit www.ironmountain.com/emrenablement.

About Iron Mountain

Iron Moun­tain Incor­po­rated (IRM 23.28, –0.23, –0.96%) pro­vides infor­ma­tion man­age­ment ser­vices that help orga­ni­za­tions lower the costs, risks and inef­fi­cien­cies of man­ag­ing their phys­i­cal and dig­i­tal data. The company’s solu­tions enable cus­tomers to pro­tect and bet­ter use their information–regardless of its for­mat, loca­tion or life­cy­cle stage–so they can opti­mize their busi­ness and ensure proper recov­ery, com­pli­ance and dis­cov­ery. Founded in 1951, Iron Moun­tain man­ages bil­lions of infor­ma­tion assets, includ­ing busi­ness records, elec­tronic files, med­ical data, emails and more for orga­ni­za­tions around the world. Visit www.ironmountain.com or fol­low the com­pany on Twit­ter at www.twitter.com/IronMountainInc for more information.

Photos/Multimedia Gallery Avail­able: http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/mmg.cgi?eid=6363165&lang=en

SOURCE: Iron Moun­tain Incorporated

Iron Moun­tain
Chris­t­ian T. Potts, 617–535-8721
christian.potts@ironmountain.com
or
Weber Shand­wick
Kris­ten Geor­gian, 617–520-7042
kgeorgian@webershandwick.com

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