Medical Records: The Space Devourer

How much time is spent going through records on a daily basis? In a medical office, it makes up for a sizeable percentage of the day. Records and documents are not only filed away, but called up again every time a patient visits.

But there is hope. With the advent of new scanning and storage technologies, you and your employees can save countless hours of filing, searching and cursing. Read on to learn more about today’s remarkable digital documentation storage and retrieval. We’ll try to answer the following questions:

• What does document scanning do for me?
• I need a real world example.
• How does it help the medical profession specifically?
• What are my options?

A tidy office is a productive office. Document scanning alleviates the clutter of filing cabinets, accumulated hours of filing, pulling and re-filing. We won’t even get into paper cuts! Converting your paper documents to digital files saves you and your employees’ time, space and frustration.

• How is this helping the medical profession in particular?

Medical records face a unique set of circumstances in the world of document storage.
The charts and records for patients are considered permanent records.’ The records are stored for reference, should the patient ever return or the administered treatment is brought into question. Because of this, each stored chart continues to grow. With a high influx of patients, your office could be over run with filing cabinets in a matter of months!

The time spent managing the onslaught of paper files will increase as the files grow in number. With this growing amount of time dedicated to inner office research comes a the mounting liability of lost and misplaced records. Again, digital document storage comes to the rescue. With a few clicks of the mouse and pecks at the keyboard, documents are found, updated, and sorted.

• Hospital Case Study

Foreseeing a switch to a paperless office, St. Mary’s Hospital made the decision to exchange their microfilm system with an electronic record organization system. The decided on a system called FileNet ™.

What had seemed like a good idea slowly turned into a monster. St. Mary’s had outsourced it’s microfilm conversion work. Now their staff was burdened with the difficult task of preparing and scanning charts and documents, a duty more complicated than originally anticipated. The process was barely keeping pace with new outpatient records.

Inpatient charts had taken over most available floor and desk space. The hospital was forced to lease storage space from an outside source capable of hosting the retrieval services. This had to be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. As you can imagine, this brought with it a considerable cost to St. Mary’s.

St. Mary’s needed help. They went to Mountain Scanners (www.mountain-scanners.com), a Colorado based document scanning company. Mountain Scanners arrived at the scene and worked with St. Mary’s staff to write an export code for images and indexes, allowing seamless export to FileNet.

Once that was accomplished, Mountain Scanners converted the enormous backlog of records, indexing document types by bar-code. Optical Character Recognition was used to differentiate account numbers. This was used as to fit the new files with the FileNet database. Once scanned and organized, the datagroups were given to St. Mary’s in the form of Compact Discs, which were kept as a secure back up. This way, St. Mary’s had a hard back up, in case anything should ever happen to their network.

But they weren’t stopping there. Mountain Scanners moved into the storage site St. Mary’s had acquired and digitized over 10,000,000 pages of documents and medical records. The end result – tens of thousands of dollars in storage and retrieval expenses saved. The one time cost finished months earlier than originally anticipated by St. Mary’s.

• Ok, I’m sold. So, what are my options?

Several popular choices include:

- Transferring paper documents into Microfiche or Microfilm
- Purchasing additional equipment and hiring extra employees for an in-house conversion to optical disk.
- Screw change! I’m happy with things the way they are, and I choose to stick with my inadequate filing system, which will eventually overrun my office, leaving no space for my employees or customers.

So what’s wrong with the choices above? None of them offer a permanent solution to the storage issue. Microfilm copies work, so long as the records are not updated. On top of that, retrieval can take up to thirty minutes. Hiring additional staff and purchasing the equipment brings on a whole new set of costs. And if you’re not willing to change with the evolving business world, you’re going to get left by the wayside.

Enter low cost solutions such as www.mountain-scanners.com, who will pick up your records, and return with a Compact Disc. The format is non-proprietary, meaning you can open it with just about any native program on your computer. Ease of use and economical pricing are the main factors in this game.

Don’t take it from me, take it from St. Mary’s. Choosing the right document scanning service is of utmost importance. For more information regarding digital document scanning and storage, visit www.mountain-scanners.com.