Information in Action by Jeica Bundy

In this special customer edition blog, Lori Jayne talks about Lahey Health's paper to electronic transition:

As the Privacy Officer and Director of Health Information at Lahey Health, I'm involved in the governance of the privacy and security of patient information. My department is not only responsible for providing patient information for treatment, payment, and operations but also for making it available for our patients so that they know what's within their medical record.

When I first started at Lahey 14 years ago, we were moving 3,000-4,000 charts a day from Iron Mountain to Lahey. Additionally, we were moving about 9,000 records internally within Lahey's campuses. We knew that we had to streamline our scanning business processes in order to improve the access to patient information so that we could provide timely and accurate patient health information and also stay in compliance with regulatory requirements.

Iron Mountain was very instrumental in our paper to electronic transition as we moved into a hybrid EMR environment. Not only did this result in savings in records transportation and touch time but between consolidation, destruction, and purges we saved well over a million dollars within a two to three year period.

As we began the project, instead of moving the physical files , we determined that we would purge records past their retention, and request records back based upon activity. This enabled us to reduce the amount of scanning required; in addition we determined that within the record there was only a subset of information that may have been required and not the entire record; working with Iron Mountain, we established an abstract record that we were able to scan scanned.

Thought this streamlined process, we've been able to convert millions of records into the EHR and instead of waiting a few days for the record, we are now able to access that record within hours now.

Right now we're in the transition from going from best of breed system, multiple electronic sources or paper into one unified EHR. With that transition, we need to ensure that access, sustainability of the information, portability of the information continues. I'll be looking to Iron Mountain to assist us with this transition to one unified EHR.

Lori Jayne, Privacy Officer and Director of Health Information at Lahey Health

How did Lahey Health re-purpose a file room after moving their records off-site?

Find out here!

About Lahey Health:

Lahey Hospital & Medical Center is a physician-led, nonprofit group practice. More than 500 physicians and 5,000 nurses, therapists and other support staff work together to provide compassionate care and superior patient outcomes. Lahey's multidisciplinary approach allows patients access to preeminent physicians from virtually every medical specialty, who cooperate to develop personalized treatment plans for each patient.

To learn more about Lahey Health please visit their website.

LINK:	http://blogs.ironmountain.com/2014/industry/healthcare-information-man...
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