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Health Care: Slow Transition to Electronic Health Records
The digitization of health records is proving to be a massive undertaking. The move from paper to electronic records has been encouraged by a pool of $25 billion of stimulus funding made available by the Obama administration to incentify hospitals and health care providers to move to electronic records.
In a survey performed by Iron Mountain, 70 percent of hospitals expect to be able to claim stage one compliance and become eligible for an incentive payment from the stimulus fund. But despite the progress being made, 78 percent of hospitals expect that they’ll still be using paper records for at least the next five years. The digitization of all records is expected to take a long time. The report found that some hospitals have budgets that in some cases exceed $100 million.
The report found that:
- 29 percent of hospitals have a central on-site scanning facility and 54 percent have distributed on-site records rooms where scanning is performed.
- 72 percent of hospitals use full-time staff to scan; 6 percent use part-time staff; and 9 percent outsource scanning operations.
- Once scanned, 58 percent of hospitals destroy the paper by shredding, while 38 percent are sending the original paper to storage.
Suggestions from the report about how scanning/capture operations could be more cost effective include:
- Preparation – Duplicate and out-dated documents should be deleted up-front, reducing the volume of paper that needs to be scanned.
- Prioritization – Prioritize and scan records that are most likely needed to be referred to soon
- Employee Utilization – The report suggests that more hospitals should adopt out-sourcing to more effectively utilize their staff resources.
