Reduce, Reuse.Repurpose by Karen Snyder

From the time we are in grade school, we're encouraged to pursue a green approach to living. By following the sage advice, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle , we help our community and the environment by saving money, energy and natural resources.

In healthcare, I'd suggest the 3Rs still rule, albeit with a slightly new twist. In today's age of shrinking budgets, increasingly complex regulations, and more resource-intensive strategies, organizations are progressively focusing on these 3Rs: Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose.

REDUCE: A wise man I worked for once said that the hospital CFO has the hardest job in America and I can understand why. Given the harsh economic realities of today, CFOs will be forced to make dramatic changes to the way their organizations are currently doing business. By creating a shared-services model for the medical records function, records storage, scanning and ROI can be moved offsite, lowering costs by eliminating redundancy, reducing labor and streamlining vendor and contract management. Additionally, destroying records in accordance with retention schedules not only reduces your legal risks, it also helps better manage your storage costs.

REUSE: Budget constraints often preclude you from adding resources to support strategic priorities like transitioning to ICD-10, so consider shifting your resources to higher-value activities, unwinding paper records management and offloading the burden of transactional work like scanning and ROI. And, as you move towards an enterprise-wide approach to Information Governance, you can leverage your Health Information Management staff, as they are well positioned to play a critical role in this transition because of their unique understanding of information content and records, information flow, user needs and compliance.

REPURPOSE: Although your journey to electronic records may be well underway, you may still have inactive, aging records stored onsite. It's likely these records are more pervasive than you realize, occupying valuable real estate that could be repurposed to generate revenue or enhance your brand. By moving your records to a secure offsite location, you can convert your real estate to clinical space or other uses, reduce your management burden, oversee their lifecycle through retention and disposition and fulfill ROI requests faster since your records are released from where they are stored.

To learn more about how you can reduce costs, reallocate your resources and repurpose your records storage space, check out the latest solution brief on this topic from Iron Mountain.

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