Iron Mountain Calls on CMS to Expand Its Rules for e-Health Records
Company Urges the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to Reimburse Healthcare Providers for Early EHR Efforts like Digitizing Paper Records
BOSTON (May 5, 2010) – 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.