January 13, 2010
"It’s simple, paper medical records kill people every day. Instead of saving lives, our current paper-based health system is killing them. As many as 98,000 Americans are killed each year due to medical errors. Hospitals and physician practices that implement electronic health records have proven they save lives." -- Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, March 15, 2006.
“We've got 21st century medical practices, but 19th century paperwork system[s]... There's a better way to enable our health care system to wring out inefficiencies and to protect our patients. So medical electronic records is going to be one of the great innovations in medicine.” – George W. Bush, January 26, 2005.
When Hurricane Katrina passed through New Orleans in 2005, it left a wake of destruction in its path. It also left a strengthened appreciation for the importance of implementing Electronic Medical Records, as the paper charts of thousands of survivors were destroyed beyond salvage, leaving patients to seek treatment without years of potentially life-saving information available.
Whether it is called an EMR (Electronic Medical Record), an EHR (Electronic Health Record), or one of the other countless acronyms for electronic patient data, significant challenges remain before we see widespread benefits from electronic patient record adoption. Clinicians face a number of decisions. Current progress notes and prescriptions may easily be entered at the patient's visit into an EMR, but what about the years and years worth of medical history already in paper charts? In addition, structured and semi-structured paper medical documents continue to change hands between physicians, hospitals, and diagnostic testing providers.
Even before a practice purchases or adopts an EMR, infoimaging can help pave the way for a successful EMR adoption. Petra Beck, a Director of Worldwide Business Planning for Eastman Kodak Company, defines infoimaging as “technology [that] represents the convergence of image and information for presentation to users under one interface.” She notes that, “by digitizing documents into electronic images, reports, forms, and other types of paperwork, they can be posted for online sharing. This leverages mature technology proven through many years of application in highly accountable, paper-intensive industries including financial services, insurance, and federal, state, and local government. . . It's a cornerstone of what the health care industry is driving toward with its vision of a unified EMR. It helps meet the requirements of HIPAA at the same time it simplifies consultation among clinicians.”
Health care providers can begin practicing well-planned infoimaging now will be in better shape when they do decide to implement an EMR. Existing scanned legacy records can be imported into the EMR, as can scanned copies of the notes, correspondence, test results, and outside forms that will persist even after many practices have gone digital. Images stored in a widely accepted format, such as PDF or TIFF, make patient data easier to transfer from one practice's system to another. Backup, disaster recovery, and access to the same patient information by multiple providers at different locations all becomes easier with infoimaging, even before an EMR is rolled out in an organization.
Patient records can be among the most challenging documents to scan. The typical patient chart contains a wide variety of paper sizes, page textures, and faint handwritten notes, all of which are important to capture into the electronic chart. Since medical office staff typically have more immediate concerns than scanner settings, many practices find it beneficial to outsource their record scanning to a HIPAA Business Associate experienced in scanning patient records. Others have found it beneficial to invest in technology that ensures an accurate scan the first time through the machine, such as a Kodak business-class scanner with Perfect Page iThresholding.
Some patients are not waiting for clinics to adopt electronic medical records for them, they are doing it themselves! Google and Microsoft have both encouraged this pro-active approach to managing one's own health information through the free Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault Personal Health Record services. Both of these services support input of structured content (such as lab results entered line-by-line) and unstructured content (such as a scanned Advance Medical Directive or test results) by their users. In time, such services hope to interface more and more with the electronic records of hospitals, pharmacies, and health care providers so that patients can both more effectively monitor and manage their health.
Interested in learning more? Download a free copy of Petra Beck's article, “Get a more complete picture of patient health.”
i/oTrak specializes in helping organizations of all sizes deal with their specific paper challenges in an easy, open, cost-effective manner. For more information on how we can help make dealing with paper easier in your professional life, contact one of i/oTrak's solution specialists for a free assessment.
