Most companies create and keep too many records and, ironically, put the organization at greater risk- the risk of keeping records too long. Any record that is being maintained and managed by a company can be subpoened and used by opposing legal counsel to harm the organisation.  By establishing a practical, appropriate and systematically applied records management and retention policy, most organizations depending on the age of the business, can identify and begin destroying 20% to 30% of their existing records.

  By breaking habit-based practices and applying and maintaining an efficient records management program, which includes a records retention scheduling policy, organizations can realize not only short and long term cost savings, but improvements in work process productivity. Easily implemented records management strategies and practices provide three significant benefits and measurable values to any business or organization:

• Improved access to needed information (documents, files and records). Appropriate indexing standards and applied retention practices are critical when searching for information. Retrieval time can be cut dramatically when improved operating controls are in place. A solid records management program allows for obsolete records to be appropriately identified and destroyed, allowing needed documents, files and records to be accessed quickly.
• Reduced legal and audit risks.  The risk of lost, missing or smoking gun records are eliminated when you standardize indexing and retention practices. When doing things the right way, you keep only the records you truly need to meet operational and regulatory requirements.  A fully cited and applied records retention schedule outlines which records an organization has and which have been identified for destruction and destroyed during the normal course of business policy and operation.

• Reduced records storage volumes and costs.  Standardized indexing practices and applied retention schedules reduce costs in real-estate, labor and capital expense.

Once an efficient records management program is implemented, organizations will be able to respond quickly to legal and audit request and demands.  Equally important, they will be able to avoid the embarrassment and costs of not being able to produce needed documents, files and record series.  When records do not exist (because they no longer have to), these companies can show proof of policy and compliance and state confidently why and how the records had been identify and destroyed.

At Data Storage we have developed an inexpensive procedure for phasing in a strategic records retention policy.  After decades of neglect the sheer volume of records stored and needing review and destruction can make rolling out a retention practice time consuming and expensive.  We propose doing this big job with our Strategic Records Retention service. 

By doing records retention chores in a strategic manner we target the record series most likely to limit your liability and expenses most and focus on completing retention work for that series before moving to the next most productive target and repeating the process. 

To learn more about the steps involved in strategic records retention, check it out at http://www.datastorageinc.com/srrs.asp

This disc array will hold about 45 songs, or 4000 pages of scanned business documents.  Almost everyone in the business world has a jump drive the size of a stick of juicy fruit gum that holds 5-50 times more information than this relic.  (And cost 1/100th of what this cost 40 years ago.)

With these advancements come some huge responsibilities.  A 4 gigabyte thumb drive can now be loaded with the equivalent of 8 filing cabinets full of scans of sensitive information.

Please take care to encrypt the information you place on removable storage media.  I recommend using TrueCrypt.  It's fast and it's free.   Once encrypted, your files will be nearly impenetrable, thereby protecting you and your clients.

 This doesn't only apply to thumb drives.  We also recommend that our customers encrypt the backup tapes they send to offsite storage to protect against disaster.  

 Almost daily we read about companies that lose backup tapes or sets of tapes and are fined for the breach of confidentiality.  TrueCrypt saves you from that.

 Better yet, backup online.

Don’t make the news with a data breach.

Scott Hambrick

918-664-6164

Customers in the medical arena keep asking me about federal funding for electronic medical records adoption.  It's true, The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funding allots a vast amount of money for healthcare IT, as shown below.

§  $2 billion for the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC)

§  $20.819 billion in incentives through the Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement systems to assist providers in adopting EHRs

§  $4.7 billion for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program

§  $2.5 billion for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Distance Learning, Telemedicine, and Broadband Program

§  $1.5 billion for construction, renovation, and equipment for health centers through the Health Resources and Services Administration

§  $1.1 billion for comparative effectiveness research within the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

§  $85 million for health IT, including telehealth services, within the Indian Health Service

§  $500 million for the Social Security Administration

§  $50 million for information technology within the Veterans Benefits Administration

The ARRA earmarks $20.819 billion for direct funding and incentives for providers who implement electronic medical records, sometimes referred to as electronic health records, (EMR/EHR) and use them in a meaningful way. The processes for enacting the provisions of the ARRA and Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, which outlines mandates for IT healthcare spending, are still evolving. 

Physicians, hospitals and other healthcare providers are being asked to pay upfront for software, install it and then prove they can use it in a meaningful fashion before they can collect funding.  The act calls this "Meaningful Use".

The Office of the National Coordinator for Healthcare Technology (ONC) is in charge of issuing guidelines on meaningful use, which may not be available until the end of August 2010.  On May 18, 2009 ONC published a document that provides a road map for their decision making. The document does not provide a firm date for establishing the definition. The document states:

Define “Meaningful use of an EHR”: The Recovery Act authorizes that incentive payments may be made to eligible professionals and hospitals that are using EHRs in a meaningful way. Specific understanding of what constitutes meaningful use will be determined through a process that will include broad stakeholder input and discussion. HHS is developing milestones for major phases of the program’s activities with planned delivery dates.

Who really knows what all of this means?  Many customers are stuck in the middle, needing to adopt some sort of electronic medical record, but are stymied because they do not know what will be eligible for governement funding. 

I think it is very likely the meaningful use definition will start very broadly and include more and more functionality and features of electronic health records over time.  This makes it more difficult to choose a emr/ehr package.  There is no way to know if the package you buy today will meet the meaningful use definition later, or if it will be grandfathered in.  Meanwhile, you might consider starting to digitize your backlog of records.  I will do my best to keep you informed of developments in this arena.

Scott Hambrick

We scan a lot of documents for our customers.  We also have a lot of EDM software installed at customer sites and we still find that it is almost never the best business decision to scan all documents. All companies that roll out an electronic document management system must face making this decision. 

Even with falling software, hardware and digital storage prices, records can still be maintained more inexpensively in a commercial records center.  No matter how inexpensive the equipment and software gets, scanning still requires a human being to prep documents by removing staples, repairing tears, etc, feeding the document feeder, doing quality control, etc.  Of course wages aren't getting any cheaper.  To justify the expense of scanning, you must either capture the documents before they are printed or before they are used.  Most of the savings recovered in the use of electronic document management are gotten during the first month or so of that documents life.  This is the time when it is being handled, transported and shared the most. 

Unless a record has historical importance or is currently in work, I do not recommend that it be scanned.  I recommend managed storage in a commercial records center at that point.  Of course, goal should always be to capture documents electronically before they are printed or worked with.

In the next post we'll discuss how to capture documents as early in the lifecycle as possible.

 (Ancient Papyrus document.  Even though it isn't in a workflow right now, I would say this should be imaged!)

When deciding whether/how/when to drive your office towards a “less paper” state, you’ll need to be looking at Electronic Document Management, or EDM.  We often hear the acronyms EDM, ECM, ERM,  EMR and others, but electronic document management (EDM) is probably what the medium sized business needs to get familiar with and move towards when looking for efficiency in records management. 

EDM is the management of digital documents.  These documents can be images, audio, video or other formats.  Remember, anything that represents permanent evidence of, or information about past events is a record.  Because these digital files are records, we have to manage them just like we manage our papers. 

EDM software suites help us manage these records.  All of the chores we did with our paper records can be done by EDM software.   These old filing and records tasks we used to do with manila folders are done electronically now and often have new or different names.

Old Name                            What was/is it?                                                                             New name

Printing                             Creating the document for filing or use                                         Capture

Labeling                            Labeling the record to ease filing and retrieval                            Indexing

Pulling/Retrieval               Searching for a file in a cabinet or on a shelf                               Querying

Filing Order                       The way records were filed.  Alpha, Num, T                                 N/A

Most of the other tasks and terms are called by the same names in EDM; retention, destruction, chain of custody, record series and more are pretty much the same. 

The point of EDM software is that it can automate many of the labor intensive tasks involved in records keeping.  Capture, indexing, filling, retention scheduling, interoffice mail, destruction and more can be scheduled and scripted tasks done for you through the magic of computers.  Now the management of a record from birth through to destruction can be automated and done electronically.