Company Urges the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to
Reimburse Healthcare Providers for Early EHR Efforts like Digitizing
Paper Records
BOSTON, May 05, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) --Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE:
IRM), an information management services company, recently called on the
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to expand its proposed
rules for the "meaningful use" of electronic health records (EHR) so
healthcare providers would be eligible to receive federal subsidies for
digitizing paper records and scrubbing patient databases.
Iron Mountain made its recommendations to CMS in response to the
agency's Meaningful Use Notice of Proposed Rulemaking published in
December.
In the regulation, CMS outlined 25 criteria that caregivers and
hospitals must meet before they can receive reimbursement under the
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Missing though from
CMS's initial proposal are key first steps like scanning physical
records and cleaning out patient databases that providers must do to
implement EHR successfully.
"In hospitals today, managing patient records consists of an inefficient
patchwork of systems, processes and decisions that have been made over
many years," said Ken Rubin, vice president and general manager of
healthcare for Iron Mountain. "If a hospital has poor processes for
storing and managing hardcopy medical records, simply digitizing them
will only add to the mess, not help solve it. 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."
Having helped more than 100 hospitals make the switch from paper to
electronic records, Iron Mountain advises healthcare providers to begin
the EHR-conversion process by consolidating and organizing hardcopy
records spread across their health system. This initial clean-up
activity should also include improving the quality of Master Patient
Index (MPI) data by scrubbing these databases for duplicate records and
destroying them. Taking these steps lowers storage costs for the
organization and provides caregivers with faster, more accurate access
to a patient's complete medical history and records.
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.
Destroying these outdated files and redundant copies cuts storage costs
and makes digitization more cost-effective.
To reduce costs further, Iron Mountain recommends 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.
Iron Mountain manages hardcopy and digital healthcare information for
more than 2,000 hospitals across 43 states.
About Iron Mountain
Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE: IRM) 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 @IronMountainInc for more information.
SOURCE: Iron Mountain Incorporated
Iron Mountain
Dan O'Neill, 617-535-2966
Dan.Oneill@ironmountain.com
or
Weber Shandwick
Kristen Georgian, 617-520-7042
KGeorgian@webershandwick.com