Breaking Industry News Electronic records make for more secure health information management Healthcare organizations can improve health information management and ensure data protection by digitizing medical records

Posted on Nov 9, 2010 in Records Management News

Novem­ber 03, 2010 — Health­care orga­ni­za­tions can improve health infor­ma­tion man­age­ment and ensure data pro­tec­tion by dig­i­tiz­ing med­ical records.

Accord­ing to indus­try experts, the poten­tial ben­e­fits of elec­tronic med­ical records include the pre­ven­tion of errors, eas­ier access and the cre­ation of per­ma­nent records. Elec­tronic records pro­vide bet­ter doc­u­men­ta­tion and an auto­matic check for pos­si­ble drug errors and inter­ac­tions. Also, records that are dig­i­tized can be eas­ily accessed from numer­ous loca­tions and allow for online backup, pro­vid­ing pro­tec­tion from tra­di­tional and unfore­seen disasters.

Quantros, a health­care safety and risk man­age­ment firm, stud­ied data gath­ered from 379 hos­pi­tals and found 133,662 med­ica­tion errors in 2008. Of those, paper-based errors resulted in 10,954 errors. But new devel­op­ments and the imple­men­ta­tion of elec­tronic health infor­ma­tion man­age­ment are elim­i­nat­ing these issues.

The U.S. gov­ern­ment has pushed elec­tronic records for health infor­ma­tion man­age­ment under the Obama admin­is­tra­tion. The Amer­i­can Rein­vest­ment and Recov­ery Act of 2008 allo­cated $19.5 bil­lion for an effort to dig­i­tize health records.

Health­care providers look­ing to qual­ify for some of this fed­eral fund­ing will pur­sue the lat­est tech­nol­ogy that improves their over­all records man­age­ment systems.

Read More Here: http://www.ironmountain.com/BreakingIndustryNewsDetail.aspx?id=17179873853

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A Reservoir of Funding for Medical Records “Unspent”

Posted on Oct 12, 2010 in Records Management News

The Fed­eral gov­ern­ment entered the elec­tronic med­ical record busi­ness in 2004. Pres­i­dent Bush directed Human Health Ser­vices to cre­ate the new posi­tion of National health infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy coor­di­na­tor by exec­u­tive order. The new posi­tion would pro­vide “lead­er­ship for the devel­op­ment and nation­wide imple­men­ta­tion of an inter­op­er­a­ble health infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy infra­struc­ture,” with the goal of estab­lish­ing elec­tronic health records for all Amer­i­cans within 10 years. With each step taken on the elec­tronic med­ical record path, sub­stan­tial and struc­tural changes have occurred, often times leav­ing the med­ical com­mu­nity in a quandary.

As we all know now, the Amer­i­can Recov­ery and Rein­vest­ment Act (ARRA) of 2009 assigned a pro­vi­sion of monies for struc­ture to facil­i­tate the adop­tion of elec­tronic health records, and to estab­lish a National Health Infor­ma­tion Infra­struc­ture for the United States. Within this Act, there is the Health Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy (HIT) for Eco­nomic and Clin­i­cal Health (HITECH) Act.

Based on fed­eral gov­ern­ment reports, the Act would accom­plish four major goals that advance the use of HIT such as elec­tronic health records by:

Requir­ing the gov­ern­ment to take a lead­er­ship role to develop stan­dards by 2010 that allow for the nation­wide elec­tronic exchange and use of health infor­ma­tion to improve qual­ity and coor­di­na­tion of care.
Invest­ing $20 bil­lion in health infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy infra­struc­ture and Medicare and Med­ic­aid incen­tives to encour­age doc­tors and hos­pi­tals to use HIT to elec­tron­i­cally exchange patients’ health infor­ma­tion.
Sav­ing the gov­ern­ment $10 bil­lion, and gen­er­at­ing addi­tional sav­ings through­out the health sec­tor, through improve­ments in qual­ity of care and care coor­di­na­tion, and reduc­tions in med­ical errors and duplica­tive care.
Strength­en­ing Fed­eral pri­vacy and secu­rity law to pro­tect iden­ti­fi­able health infor­ma­tion from mis­use as the health care sec­tor increases use of Health IT.

Encour­aged by the fed­eral fund­ing man­date, states have been set­ting up infra­struc­tures to facil­i­tate the fun­nel­ing of HIT fund­ing. These funds will even­tu­ally flow down to the urban and rural physi­cians or med­ical groups.

Elec­tronic Health Records Everywhere

While Ari­zona may be ahead of many states con­cern­ing the adop­tion of elec­tronic health records (EHR) and e-prescribing, an Ari­zona State Uni­ver­sity sur­vey spon­sored by AHCCCS, with responses received from a total of 6,777 physi­cians (Respon­dents, N=6,777) liv­ing in Ari­zona of whom, 6,028 were allo­pathic physi­cians and 749 were osteo­pathic physi­cians, are nowhere EMR ready. It is best to offer basic def­i­n­i­tions to the acronym EHR and EMR at this point.

The EMR is the legal record cre­ated in hos­pi­tals and ambu­la­tory envi­ron­ments that is the source of data for the EHR. The EHR rep­re­sents the abil­ity to eas­ily share med­ical infor­ma­tion among stake­hold­ers includ­ing, patients, con­sumers, health­care providers, employ­ers, and oth­ers, to have a patient’s infor­ma­tion fol­low him or her through the var­i­ous modal­i­ties of care engaged by that individual.

The Ari­zona State Uni­ver­sity sur­vey, point to a num­ber of issues. For exam­ple, results indi­cate nearly 20% of the physi­cians (N=6,699) have nei­ther Inter­net or email access at their prac­tices. In rural Ari­zona, high-speed con­nec­tion, either through cable, phone line or fiber, might be too expen­sive to pur­chase for a small med­ical group or a sin­gle physi­cian prac­tice. The deliv­ery of high speed con­nec­tiv­ity for data, voice and multi-media ser­vices is far more com­mon in the urban set­ting, and often times less expensive.

Sur­vey results (N=6,387) regard­ing med­ical record stor­age on one hand, indi­cate that approx­i­mately 46% of physi­cians used paper files as their sole method of stor­ing med­ical records, and only 13% of the physi­cians rely solely on Elec­tronic Med­ical Records. The most preva­lent use of EMRs’ is in com­bi­na­tion with paper files or with scanned files. Taken together, the com­bi­na­tions rep­re­sent the use of EMR’s by more than 32% of the physicians.

On the other hand, med­ical cam­puses like Scotts­dale Health­care are ahead of the tech­nol­ogy curve. Scotts­dale HC affil­i­ated physi­cians not only have deployed elec­tronic med­ical records they have adopted Per­sonal Health Record (PHR) sys­tem con­nected thru Relay Health. Early in 2009 this PHR sys­tem was launched. Now in June, the cam­puses will be launch­ing an Emer­gency Room (ER) Infor­ma­tion Sys­tem to facil­i­tate com­mu­ni­ca­tions between the hospital’s ER and the patient’s pri­mary care physi­cian accord­ing to James Cramer, VP/CIO. The sys­tem will ben­e­fit both – the physi­cian and the patient, because it will elim­i­nate tran­scrip­tion delays with real-time deliv­ery of infor­ma­tion as the ER doc­tor com­pletes the chart.

Arizona’s Sprin­kle of Funds

Physi­cians should find some com­fort in know­ing they are not alone in try­ing to com­pre­hend Elec­tronic Health Records. A Regional Exten­sion Cen­ter pro­gram will serve as a neu­tral source for cred­i­ble EHR and Health Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy infor­ma­tion. Ari­zona Health-e Con­nec­tion (AzHeC), a statewide non-profit orga­ni­za­tion, applied for HITECH fund­ing late 2009. With part of its mis­sion to lead Ari­zona in the adop­tion of health infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy, it was awarded $10.8 mil­lion to develop a Regional Exten­sion Cen­ter pro­gram to serve Arizona’s health­care providers.

The pro­gram is much needed as health­care providers seek to nav­i­gate EHR options and select ven­dors that meet Fed­eral Mean­ing­ful Use require­ments. Even though the ser­vice is highly sub­si­dized for physi­cians by the Fed­eral grant, the ques­tion is – will physi­cians step up to adopt elec­tronic med­ical records or wait until penal­ized for not doing so? As laid out in Amer­i­can Recov­ery and Rein­vest­ment Act incen­tive plan, a penalty scheme for non com­pli­ance after 2014 is pro­vided in the Act.

Ini­tial Invest­ment in Elec­tronic Records

Under a pros­per­ous eco­nomic envi­ron­ment, going for­ward with an invest­ment of any size or type is based on an assess­ment on return on invest­ment. The chal­lenge today is that the invest­ment equa­tion has changed. Even a solid cash flow fore­cast with detail sup­port­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion is not con­vinc­ing enough in today’s low-risk lend­ing envi­ron­ment accord­ing to Desert Prac­tice Man­age­ment. It seems the credit mar­kets are in a con­tin­ual flux and loans for elec­tronic med­ical records includ­ing equip­ment upgrades many take many weeks to com­plete the due dili­gence and under­writ­ing; and that process could take much longer in the months ahead depend­ing on the econ­omy recov­ery. Fur­ther, only a few Ari­zona banks have health care prac­tices to address med­ical prac­tice expan­sion, new prac­tices, EMR soft­ware, IT equip­ment and other health­care related asset fund­ing needs.

By and large, banks have declined to increase work­ing cap­i­tal loans to well-established med­ical prac­tices. In one case, a bank cut the credit lim­its of a med­ical prac­tice by 50% accord­ing to Jim Wolfe, Prin­ci­pal, Wolfe Con­sult­ing. Fur­ther, many prac­tices are expe­ri­enc­ing a decline in rev­enues as patients lose their health care ben­e­fits or can not, will not to pay co-pays, coin­sur­ance, or deductibles. Like any other busi­nesses with rev­enue declin­ing, med­ical prac­tices must take mea­sures to pre­serve income. This is result­ing in post­pon­ing cap­i­tal pur­chases and in some cases, reduc­ing staff. In spite of the tight credit mar­kets, physi­cians could look at alter­na­tive means to access­ing med­ical records tech­nol­ogy such as an “Appli­ca­tion Ser­vice Provider” model elim­i­nat­ing cer­tain upfront costs. This model could mea­sur­ably reduce ini­tial cap­i­tal costs.

Wait-n-see Atti­tude

With the great reces­sion of the early 21st cen­tury not let­ting up as of this writ­ing, how is a sin­gle prac­tice or small med­ical group going to adopt elec­tronic med­ical records in today’s eco­nomic cli­mate? Physi­cians begrudg­ingly may con­vert their work­flow prac­tices to EMR, but for the imme­di­ate, tak­ing a leap of faith on a finan­cial oblig­a­tion with some much uncer­tainty, may not hap­pen any­time soon. On top the eco­nomic uncer­tainty is the con­tin­u­ous threat to cut Medicare. This con­tentious issue will sur­face again in Decem­ber 2010. So who would want to invest in the face of so much uncertainty?

Infor­ma­tion pro­vided by the Mari­copa County Med­ical Soci­ety, sug­gest that the econ­omy, and the expe­ri­ence of elec­tronic prac­tices are nowhere near all the EHR and EMR hype. Thus, physi­cians may likely wait until they are man­dated to adopt. In the final analy­sis, most med­ical doc­tors do not want to incur the great expense in time and money to con­vert at this junc­ture of the adop­tion program.

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Data Storage: Storing Health Records in the Cloud: 10 Reasons Why It’s a Bad Idea

Posted on Aug 18, 2010 in Records Management News

By Chris Preimes­berger on 2010-08-17

Cloud com­put­ing is a hot con­cept in the e-health records busi­ness. It’s easy to deploy and use, lit­tle or no infra­struc­ture is needed, and you pay as you go. The debate con­tin­ues about how secure impor­tant per­sonal doc­u­ments, such as finan­cials and health care reports, are in cloud stor­age; there seems to be no con­clu­sive answers. Both the pro– and anti-cloud camps have clear points in their favor. This slide show exam­ines the poten­tial pit­falls of stor­ing health records in the cloud and why physi­cians should store and main­tain their data on local ser­vices instead of in a dis­tant, Web-based, on-demand sys­tem. A key dis­clo­sure: Our chief resource here is Dr. Jonathan Bert­man, founder and CEO of Amaz­ing Charts, a client/server-based health-care record soft­ware maker. Not­ing his pro­fes­sional bias, here are his views that the cloud isn’t the best place to store for your per­sonal health records.
Read more and view slide show at:

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Data-Storage/Storing-Health-Records-in-the-Cloud-10-Reasons-Why-Its-a-Bad-Idea-290388/

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Stockton, CA; Dental firm to destroy patient records

Posted on Apr 19, 2010 in Records Management News

Den­tal firm to destroy patient records
By Scott Smith; Record Staff Writer
April 18, 2010 12:00 AM

STOCKTON — It may for­ever remain a mys­tery exactly how thou­sands of den­tal records — filled with names, Social Secu­rity num­bers and birth dates — came to be aban­doned in a Stock­ton stor­age unit.

But Dan Moore, the trea­sure hunter who recently bought them with a $15 bid among other valu­ables, said that the Den­tal Group of Stock­ton has offered to pay him for the records and prop­erly dis­pose of them.

“They’re going to destroy them,” he said. “That’s that.”

That’s fine with the Den­tal Board of Cal­i­for­nia, said Russ Heimerich, a spokesman for the Cal­i­for­nia Depart­ment of Con­sumer Affairs, which inves­ti­gates such problems.

The state’s main con­cern, he said, is that the den­tal records con­tain­ing sen­si­tive per­sonal infor­ma­tion are prop­erly destroyed, stored or returned to patients.

“As long as that hap­pens, the Den­tal Board is good with it all,” Heimerich said.

The con­fu­sion for Moore began recently when he bought the con­tents of the stor­age unit in an auc­tion, as he’s done for sev­eral years. Such pur­chases have scored him small trea­sures, such as a refrig­er­a­tor and com­puter desk, that he can quickly resell.

This lat­est pur­chase left him with 140 boxes of den­tal records, which he esti­mated held 6,000 patient records. On the boxes was writ­ten “Uni­ver­sal Care,” appar­ently the name of a defunct den­tal business.

A lit­tle sleuthing led Moore to the Robin­hood Drive office that houses the Den­tal Group of Stock­ton, who took over Uni­ver­sal Care’s busi­ness. The Den­tal Group ini­tially turned Moore away, sus­pect­ing a scam in the works. The busi­ness has changed its stance.

The Den­tal Group still main­tains that it did not sign a con­tract oblig­at­ing it for Uni­ver­sal Care’s stor­age unit and records. Yet, the com­pany offered to buy the records from Moore to do the right thing for the patients.

Moore declined to say how much he’ll receive, except to say it will cover his expenses. He said the busi­ness asked Moore not to dis­close the amount. The Den­tal Group will col­lect the records from Moore on April 23.

Moore said he’s relieved the records will be han­dled prop­erly. He added that he never plot­ted to scam the dentist’s office.

“I’m not the bad guy,” he said. “I’m try­ing to do right.”

Con­tact reporter Scott Smith at (209) 546‑8296 or ssmith@recordnet.com.

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