Scanning patient records | A fool’s errand?
Guess what?
The EHR is not a panacea for healthcare systems to deliver quality patient care. Clinicians deliver care when they have an integrated long-term view of a patient’s health history. In order to do that, what is required is information strategy, not information dumping into the EHR.
Digitizing patient records is often shied away from by healthcare systems thinking this is an overwhelming, daunting task, impossible to accomplish or absurdly expensive. Fortunately, neither one of these is true. Unfortunately, too many health systems think that it is. So, they leave in place untold volumes of legacy patient files in storage and almost solely focus on the EHR going forward. Instead, what is truly required, is a transformation bridge between legacy patient data and the EHR. Too many health systems believe that the path to accomplish this is to unilaterally scan a large volume of patient charts, in their entirety, in a single project, using some standard formula which identifies which charts should be scanned, and which to leave behind. This in fact is what is unnecessary and extremely costly.
What is needed is to create an ecosystem for longitudinal patient data.
That is a bridge between legacy data on an as-needed basis, patient by patient, transferring that information to the EHR, in effect creating the foundation for continuous quality care delivery.
This is best accomplished by putting in place a scan-on-demand and scan-on-need process which initiates a one-time retrieval that then permits the organization to move the legacy record toward well-defined destruction protocols. This is an active information transformation strategy that allows the organization to retrieve what is needed, append it to the EHR, yet permit the health system to finally reduce its long-term dependency on perpetual storage and the continuously adverse, costly terms and conditions imposed by storage vendors.
This also allows clinicians to actively bridge their practice’s patient histories to a central EHR upon the decision to be acquired and integrated into a larger healthcare system.
Active information transformation linked to an organizational information governance policy is the smart way to preserve current and long-term patient histories, while instituting a cost-reduction strategy, as well. A continuous effort that builds the EHR into the center of information is a logical on-going strategy instead of a perceived, or real, costly one-time ad-hoc program of digitizing some defined volume of patient histories.
When do we finally realize that the EHR is the 800 pound gorilla in the room?
But the EHR is not the controller of the purse or the organization’s information ruler. A continuous effort that extracts a healthcare system from long-term legacy charts, AND preserves vital patient data - as needed - is the cost effective method to ensure the delivery of quality care without costly large-scale digitation projects.
There is a better way.