Hospitals large and small that once relied solely on paper records and film radiology are seeing massive savings and convenience by switching to an outsourced method of storage and retrieval.
The savings in resources and material alone often pay for the third-party companies providing offsite
data storage that have established HIEs and PACS. Document management positions are being eliminated and/or moved to other areas of the hospital where they can be of more use.
Most hospitals, whether they’re large urban facilities or rural critical care facilities, are converting 95 percent or more of their records into digital copies, which are securely stored and can be shared at a moment’s notice. The amount of space these facilities are freeing up is extraordinary, and their
ability to access data is no much easier.
Taking on a third party to help manage image records and other data also takes the strain off of IT departments. Most of the companies that offer these services have vendor neutral archiving architecture, which not only makes sharing data between disparate systems easy, it also makes it easier on the IT
staff.
Federal guidelines have also created a hurdle for hospitals still tied to paper records and film images. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which Congress passed in 1996, included data security measures that forced hospitals to consider digital options rather than staying with antiquated paper filing system. Few hospitals could provide adequate security for their old
system.
In a typical paper filing process, when a patient would show up in the emergency room, the doctor would page the nursing supervisor to go into the medical records room, locate the data needed and return to the ER with the information. In some facilities, the process would take more than an hour. But
with the technology available today, the same information can be pulled up in seconds.
Outsourcing patient records has saved many hospitals as much as 50 percent of what they paid for their paper records system. Savings are only part of the benefit of going with digital records – doctors are better able to serve their patients when outsourced patient records and radiology images can be easily
accessed and shared with other doctors and specialists.
Healthcare facilities that have outsourced their records management to offsite data storage specialists have confidence that they achieve government financial reimbursements with more efficiency, and that the process will stand up to federal guidelines.
OffSite Image Management, Inc., is a company that specializes in data storage for rural hospitals. OffSite takes the confidentiality rules in HIPAA very seriously and offers secure and reliable
storage and disaster recovery solutions to its clients. Facilities that contract with OffSite are completely protected and have immediate access to all the stored records they’ve entrusted to OffSite.
OffSite has a great record of 99.9 percent uptime so that healthcare professionals can treat their patients, and with 128-bit encryption in file transfers and dual clustered servers backing up the data – safety and security are not an issue.