Iron Mountain Improves Health of Hospital Medical Records

Iron Mountain Incorporated believes it has the cure for what ails hospitals struggling to transition to an electronic health record (EHR). The company announced it will begin offering a diagnostic assessment that shows the nation’s largest hospitals how to process patient records more efficiently, speeding care and shortening revenue cycles. The diagnostic tool is part of Iron Mountain’s shift toward a more consultative approach in the healthcare space and is the latest in a string of recent moves by the company to support healthcare providers’ drive to lower costs while improving patient care.

Generally taking 3-4 weeks to complete, the assessment helps healthcare organizations to automate workflows and fund the transition to electronic health records by identifying inefficiencies in their current medical records management practices. The assessment is designed for large teaching hospitals and multi-hospital healthcare networks, where numerous file rooms and records storage vendors create the need for greater efficiency.

"Most hospitals are struggling to transition from paper records to more efficient electronic health records," said Ed Santangelo, Iron Mountain’s senior vice president of healthcare. "While many see the value in moving to the electronic version, they’re just not sure how to make the switch with existing resources and without disrupting care. Our assessment lets hospitals take an evolutionary approach to enact what potentially can be self-funding changes without affecting their daily mission to provide quality patient care. They can save money on records storage, ease into an EHR and re-engineer existing processes."

Long heralded as a way for healthcare providers to improve patient care and efficiency, electronic health records have proven too costly and complex for most hospitals to adopt entirely. According to a survey conducted by the American Hospital Association in 2006, only 11 percent of the nation’s hospitals had fully implemented electronic health records. Another 57 percent of hospitals reported having a partially implemented EHR. President Bush has set a goal for all Americans to have an electronic medical record by 2014.

Iron Mountain’s assessment looks at the costs of staff, third-party vendors, storage and even lost revenue from file rooms occupying space that hospitals could use for treating patients. Additionally, the company reviews the hospital’s methods for processing patient records. In a paper-based hospital, the medical records staff must assemble charts, code them and perform other actions sequentially. Hospitals cannot complete these activities concurrently like they can with electronic medical records. While this process for handling patient records can take up to six months for every discharge, Iron Mountain has been able to cut this time for some customers to just 30 days by helping them store paper records more efficiently and enabling them to digitize patient charts on an as-needed basis.

Adopted from RMS Services, a healthcare records specialist acquired by Iron Mountain, the assessment isn’t the only new addition in the company’s suite of healthcare offerings. Recognizing that the healthcare market is laboring to transition from paper-based to electronic records, Iron Mountain has made a series of recent investments to better address this need. Earlier this year, Iron Mountain introduced two digital archives-one that provides long-term archiving and off-site disaster recovery for digital medical images and another that stores and protects electronic copies of medical records and other documents. And planned for early next year, Iron Mountain will expand its release of information service, having just entered into a software licensing agreement with Cobius Healthcare Solutions, LLC.