By Mark Brousseau
Every organization, regardless of industry, needs to have a records management policy, and they must have a records manager. Nonetheless, it can be an uphill climb convincing top managers to embrace records management, Kevin Joerling, senior project manager, records management, Perceptive Software, said yesterday at the company’s Inspire 2011 user conference at the Wynn in Las Vegas.
Records and information management is defined as the systematic control of records and information throughout their lifecycle, encompassing creation, use, storage, retention, and disposition. “Retention is where we find many companies are not doing a very good job – knowing how long to keep documents,” Joerling said
And this is an area where companies can waste a lot of money, Joerling said: For every $1 spent on disk storage, $3 to $8 per megabyte is spent on managing that storage, he explained. “In some cases, companies don’t even realize this,” he said.
Joerling said records and information is more important than ever because it: reduces storage costs; organizations information for quick retrieval; facilitates litigation risk avoidance; helps protect information assets; and ensures compliance with recordkeeping laws and regulations. To this last point, Joerling said records management is a key part of an organization’s commitment to risk mitigation.
“Liability lawsuits are often decided on the basis of old records,” Joerling explained. What’s more, the loss of records can have more devastating consequences than the loss of a plant, Joerling said, noting that some companies based in the World Trade Center during 9/11 went out of business because they didn’t have backup records.
So why don’t more top execs embrace records management?
For starters, most top execs don’t understand records management. “Records management is not mainstream yet,” he said. “It’s not taught in too many colleges or universities, so business managers coming out of school don’t understand it.” Many organizations also don’t have a records management professional. “Who’s going to be that champion in your company to go to senior management and say ‘We need to look into this because we could get in trouble by not doing it?’” Joerling asked.
Additionally, records and information management benefits can be difficult to quantify. With tight budgets as a result of the recession, this makes it more difficult to persuade senior management about records and information management.
Joerling offered tips for selling top execs on the need for records management:
1. Describe how records management will solve issues facing your organization.
2. Propose a recommended solution, whether it’s hiring a records manager or records management consultant.
3. Detail what will happen if a records management program is not undertaken.
4. Explain when the records management program will be deployed, and how much money, how much time and how many people will be needed for the program.
5. Keep the discussions at a high level and targeted to c-level core concerns, such as how the program ties into the company’s strategic plan.
“It’s an uphill battle because you’re dealing with something that a lot of executives don’t understand and don’t recognize why it needs to be done,” Joerling admitted. But with the growing importance of records and information management, it’s critical that document professionals convince top execs on the need for a program.
What do you think?
Showing posts with label EHR EMR. Show all posts
Showing posts with label EHR EMR. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Consolidating patient records
By Mark Brousseau
As they move to electronic medical records (EMRs), one challenge for healthcare providers is how to consolidate electronic access to all of a patient’s documents.
Citizens Memorial Healthcare, which is made up of a hospital, 25 clinics, five long-term care facilities and a cancer center, has licked this problem by using ImageNow from Perceptive Software to tie together documents not captured in its Meditech 5.6 EMR system, including EKGs, radiology reports, outside lab results, wound and surgical photos and registration photos. This integration has allowed Citizens Memorial Healthcare to create a shared medical record across its enterprise.
In its EMR environment, regardless of visit, a patient’s documents are organized under a common number. To access documents related to an account that were not captured at the point-of-service by the EMR, the provider launches ImageNow in the background, allowing documents from either application to be displayed in the EMR system. To speed retrieval, ImageNow indexes documents in several categories; for instance, physicians can view patient diagnostics without having to look through registration documents. Documents also can be retrieved across accounts.
Electronic documents are created at the point-of-registration or via scanning later.
For primary care physicians that don’t have a way to get their EMR records into Citizens Memorial Healthcare’s system, ImageNow provides the ability to “scrape” data off of incoming faxes. As faxes come in to Citizens Memorial Healthcare, they are placed in a workflow queue where an employee triggers the technology.
“Our long-term goal is to have a true interface with Meditech for these documents. But we don’t have that in place now. ImageNow has provided that availability,” Tim Roberts, IS specialist, Citizens Memorial Healthcare, said yesterday during a presentation at Perceptive Software’s Inspire 2011 user conference in Las Vegas.
As they move to electronic medical records (EMRs), one challenge for healthcare providers is how to consolidate electronic access to all of a patient’s documents.
Citizens Memorial Healthcare, which is made up of a hospital, 25 clinics, five long-term care facilities and a cancer center, has licked this problem by using ImageNow from Perceptive Software to tie together documents not captured in its Meditech 5.6 EMR system, including EKGs, radiology reports, outside lab results, wound and surgical photos and registration photos. This integration has allowed Citizens Memorial Healthcare to create a shared medical record across its enterprise.
In its EMR environment, regardless of visit, a patient’s documents are organized under a common number. To access documents related to an account that were not captured at the point-of-service by the EMR, the provider launches ImageNow in the background, allowing documents from either application to be displayed in the EMR system. To speed retrieval, ImageNow indexes documents in several categories; for instance, physicians can view patient diagnostics without having to look through registration documents. Documents also can be retrieved across accounts.
Electronic documents are created at the point-of-registration or via scanning later.
For primary care physicians that don’t have a way to get their EMR records into Citizens Memorial Healthcare’s system, ImageNow provides the ability to “scrape” data off of incoming faxes. As faxes come in to Citizens Memorial Healthcare, they are placed in a workflow queue where an employee triggers the technology.
“Our long-term goal is to have a true interface with Meditech for these documents. But we don’t have that in place now. ImageNow has provided that availability,” Tim Roberts, IS specialist, Citizens Memorial Healthcare, said yesterday during a presentation at Perceptive Software’s Inspire 2011 user conference in Las Vegas.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Critical Actions for HIE
By Mark Brousseau
There are five critical actions that healthcare organizations need to take to ensure the success of their information sharing initiatives, Jamie Welch, CIO, Louisiana Rural Health Information Exchange (LARHX) told attendees this morning at HIMSS10 at the Georgia World Congress, in Atlanta.
LARHX’s information sharing initiative includes telemedicine, distance learning, physician learning, physician rotation, patient information sharing, electronic medical records, and mobile mammograms.
These are the five critical actions Welch outlined:
Work at the grassroots level to articulate your business case.
“If you start to boil the ocean before you boil the pond, it’s not going to work,” Welch said. “We know the lingo and we know the vendors – it’s what we do. For the general public, it’s not. The majority of what they hear about health IT is about a Congress that can’t decide if it’s good or bad, and about information breaches.”
“From Day 1, we made sure that everyone understood what the benefits of our project would be over time. We had to convince people that if you let us do this, then these would be the benefits you will see,” Welch said. “Once we got people to see this, then a lot of our challenges solved themselves.”
Link your objectives to measurable outcomes
“You need to present something that is tangible. Everybody likes the cold, hard data, not theoretical information,” Welch said. “We keep track of everything: money saved, days saved, travel time saved, waiting room time saved, duplicate tests saved – you name it.”
Define the governance strategy that works best for your participants
“One model isn’t going to work for everybody,” Welch said.
Mix and match best practices
“We all know what the best practices are. But we can’t all pattern ourselves after each other, because each part of the country is different, and each patient population is different,” Welch said. “Take the best of all worlds and make it work for you.”
Remember that this is not an IT project – it’s a patient project
“Keep patients and physicians involved, and remember it is all about the patient and the physician and better health outcomes,” Welch said. “The health IT element is frosting.”
What do you think?
There are five critical actions that healthcare organizations need to take to ensure the success of their information sharing initiatives, Jamie Welch, CIO, Louisiana Rural Health Information Exchange (LARHX) told attendees this morning at HIMSS10 at the Georgia World Congress, in Atlanta.
LARHX’s information sharing initiative includes telemedicine, distance learning, physician learning, physician rotation, patient information sharing, electronic medical records, and mobile mammograms.
These are the five critical actions Welch outlined:
Work at the grassroots level to articulate your business case.
“If you start to boil the ocean before you boil the pond, it’s not going to work,” Welch said. “We know the lingo and we know the vendors – it’s what we do. For the general public, it’s not. The majority of what they hear about health IT is about a Congress that can’t decide if it’s good or bad, and about information breaches.”
“From Day 1, we made sure that everyone understood what the benefits of our project would be over time. We had to convince people that if you let us do this, then these would be the benefits you will see,” Welch said. “Once we got people to see this, then a lot of our challenges solved themselves.”
Link your objectives to measurable outcomes
“You need to present something that is tangible. Everybody likes the cold, hard data, not theoretical information,” Welch said. “We keep track of everything: money saved, days saved, travel time saved, waiting room time saved, duplicate tests saved – you name it.”
Define the governance strategy that works best for your participants
“One model isn’t going to work for everybody,” Welch said.
Mix and match best practices
“We all know what the best practices are. But we can’t all pattern ourselves after each other, because each part of the country is different, and each patient population is different,” Welch said. “Take the best of all worlds and make it work for you.”
Remember that this is not an IT project – it’s a patient project
“Keep patients and physicians involved, and remember it is all about the patient and the physician and better health outcomes,” Welch said. “The health IT element is frosting.”
What do you think?
Sunday, February 28, 2010
The ICD-10 Challenge
By Mark Brousseau
“ICD-10 is probably one of the biggest changes to occur in health IT in 30 years,” Dr. Joe Nichols, Edifecs medical director, told attendees at the Medical Banking Project Boot Camp this afternoon at HIMSS10 in Atlanta. “It is massive.”
ICD codes, which were developed for coding institutionally related procedures, are maintained by the World Health Organization (WHO). Most developed countries other than the United States use ICD-10, Nichols noted. The United States still uses ICD-9 codes. The international version of ICD-10 contains approximately 12,400 diagnostic codes. WHO approved the U.S. version of ICD-10, which contains approximately 69,000 codes.
As of October 1, 2013, all claims in the United States must use ICD-10.
Why is this so important? Because ICD-10 is a cornerstone of healthcare information, Nichols said. “It is the standard for defining the health state of the patient, and the institutional procedures that patients may receive to maintain or improve their health state,” he explained. “This is a big change in the coding system.” What was 14,300 codes under ICD-9 will rise to 69,000 codes under ICD-10, Nichols noted, with the number of procedure codes increasing from 3,800 to 72,000 under ICD-10.
With ICD codes pervasive throughout most health systems, and many business functions impacted by the codes, it is important that healthcare organizations have plan for supporting ICD-10 codes.
“ICD-10 codes are used for a lot of things,” Nichols said. As examples, he mentioned: actuarial and financial risk; adjudication; outcomes; population health analysis; benefits design; fraud, waste and abuse analysis; quality and efficiency assessment; medical policies and clinical guidelines; payment rules; clinical history; utilization; and regulatory reporting. “We based a lot of our national policies on this,” Nichols said. “The implications are far-reaching. Imperfect mapping from ICD-9 to ICD-10 will affect processing and analytics in a way that impacts revenue, costs, risk and relationships.”
So how do you deal with this?
“If you haven’t started now, you’re going to be behind the gun,” Nichols said. But organizations need to look at their short-term goals with a long-term vision, to determine what solutions they need today, and whether those solutions will meet future needs. Organizations also need to be aware of ICD-10’s touch points with other initiatives, and the potential downstream impacts of the change. And they should collaborate with business and trading partners as they develop their ICD-10 plans. Finally, organizations should use ICD-10 to try to position themselves for competitive advantage. “There are huge competitive advantages to using ICD-10 better than your competitors,” Nichols explained.
“ICD-10 is probably one of the biggest changes to occur in health IT in 30 years,” Dr. Joe Nichols, Edifecs medical director, told attendees at the Medical Banking Project Boot Camp this afternoon at HIMSS10 in Atlanta. “It is massive.”
ICD codes, which were developed for coding institutionally related procedures, are maintained by the World Health Organization (WHO). Most developed countries other than the United States use ICD-10, Nichols noted. The United States still uses ICD-9 codes. The international version of ICD-10 contains approximately 12,400 diagnostic codes. WHO approved the U.S. version of ICD-10, which contains approximately 69,000 codes.
As of October 1, 2013, all claims in the United States must use ICD-10.
Why is this so important? Because ICD-10 is a cornerstone of healthcare information, Nichols said. “It is the standard for defining the health state of the patient, and the institutional procedures that patients may receive to maintain or improve their health state,” he explained. “This is a big change in the coding system.” What was 14,300 codes under ICD-9 will rise to 69,000 codes under ICD-10, Nichols noted, with the number of procedure codes increasing from 3,800 to 72,000 under ICD-10.
With ICD codes pervasive throughout most health systems, and many business functions impacted by the codes, it is important that healthcare organizations have plan for supporting ICD-10 codes.
“ICD-10 codes are used for a lot of things,” Nichols said. As examples, he mentioned: actuarial and financial risk; adjudication; outcomes; population health analysis; benefits design; fraud, waste and abuse analysis; quality and efficiency assessment; medical policies and clinical guidelines; payment rules; clinical history; utilization; and regulatory reporting. “We based a lot of our national policies on this,” Nichols said. “The implications are far-reaching. Imperfect mapping from ICD-9 to ICD-10 will affect processing and analytics in a way that impacts revenue, costs, risk and relationships.”
So how do you deal with this?
“If you haven’t started now, you’re going to be behind the gun,” Nichols said. But organizations need to look at their short-term goals with a long-term vision, to determine what solutions they need today, and whether those solutions will meet future needs. Organizations also need to be aware of ICD-10’s touch points with other initiatives, and the potential downstream impacts of the change. And they should collaborate with business and trading partners as they develop their ICD-10 plans. Finally, organizations should use ICD-10 to try to position themselves for competitive advantage. “There are huge competitive advantages to using ICD-10 better than your competitors,” Nichols explained.
ARRA: A Whole New World
By Mark Brousseau
Last year was a year of transition for HIPAA, medical privacy and medical banking, Richard D. Marks of McLean, VA-based Patient Command, Inc. (www.patientcommand.com), told attendees this afternoon at the Medical Banking Project Boot Camp at the HIMSS10 conference in Atlanta.
“ARRA changes the rules for security of health information in the United States,” Marks said. “It creates an entirely new framework because it changes HIPAA so much and because it changes privacy in medical records. And, most significantly, it changes the whole approach to enforcement.”
“It’s fair to say that for the last decade, there has not been any real attempt on the part of the federal government to enforce HIPAA,” Marks explained. “ARRA changes that. What it brings into law, for the first time, is the hierarchy of diligence and culpability. There are increased, tiered civil and criminal monetary penalties, topping out at $50,000 per violation, with an annual limit of $1,500,000. These numbers are enough to get your attention. But the statute also includes civil and criminal liability for individuals, as well as organizations. Which individuals, you ask? Well, it could be you! And some people won’t figure this out, and you will see some prosecutions,” Marks predicted.
Integrated health information security is inherent in ARRA, Marks added.
References in business associate contracts now, by law, apply mutually to covered entities and business associates, Marks pointed out. “The impact of that is to rebalance all of the risk allocation that is in these agreements, and it creates a whole new set of possibilities for liabilities. Some folks will be less affected than others. But some of you will be affected will be enormously,” Marks said.
For instance, security is now an active responsibility of the board of directors and senior executives, if you are doing anything that touches healthcare, Marks said. “If you’re a public company you’ve really go to ask yourself how you do disclosure when you have to take on a much greater risk for your information systems,” Marks said. “What this all means is that you must have integrated, shared systems security that is comprehensive and fast, and upgraded from what you now have.”
Some of the changes in ARRA won’t go into effect until 2011. “But some of this is in effect now, because people, such as ambitious state attorneys general, are going to start enforcing HIPAA,” Marks said. “The bottom line is that ARRA makes it a whole new world in healthcare.”
Last year was a year of transition for HIPAA, medical privacy and medical banking, Richard D. Marks of McLean, VA-based Patient Command, Inc. (www.patientcommand.com), told attendees this afternoon at the Medical Banking Project Boot Camp at the HIMSS10 conference in Atlanta.
“ARRA changes the rules for security of health information in the United States,” Marks said. “It creates an entirely new framework because it changes HIPAA so much and because it changes privacy in medical records. And, most significantly, it changes the whole approach to enforcement.”
“It’s fair to say that for the last decade, there has not been any real attempt on the part of the federal government to enforce HIPAA,” Marks explained. “ARRA changes that. What it brings into law, for the first time, is the hierarchy of diligence and culpability. There are increased, tiered civil and criminal monetary penalties, topping out at $50,000 per violation, with an annual limit of $1,500,000. These numbers are enough to get your attention. But the statute also includes civil and criminal liability for individuals, as well as organizations. Which individuals, you ask? Well, it could be you! And some people won’t figure this out, and you will see some prosecutions,” Marks predicted.
Integrated health information security is inherent in ARRA, Marks added.
References in business associate contracts now, by law, apply mutually to covered entities and business associates, Marks pointed out. “The impact of that is to rebalance all of the risk allocation that is in these agreements, and it creates a whole new set of possibilities for liabilities. Some folks will be less affected than others. But some of you will be affected will be enormously,” Marks said.
For instance, security is now an active responsibility of the board of directors and senior executives, if you are doing anything that touches healthcare, Marks said. “If you’re a public company you’ve really go to ask yourself how you do disclosure when you have to take on a much greater risk for your information systems,” Marks said. “What this all means is that you must have integrated, shared systems security that is comprehensive and fast, and upgraded from what you now have.”
Some of the changes in ARRA won’t go into effect until 2011. “But some of this is in effect now, because people, such as ambitious state attorneys general, are going to start enforcing HIPAA,” Marks said. “The bottom line is that ARRA makes it a whole new world in healthcare.”
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