Everyone wants to take their office into the digital age, but the backlog of legacy paper records is often the biggest problem holding organizations back.  How do you go live with a digital records program on the first of April when your users were working with paper contracts on March 31st?  Often, what happens is an underground set of paper files begins to be used in your organization.  If there is no coherent method for dealing with the paper records in use before the "go live" date, how else could a diligent employee deal with it?

We have some suggestions.  

1.  Move ALL paper records out of the offices the weekend before the go live date.  This will prevent people from doing double work by essentially continuing to maintain their paper records and the new digital records in your EDM.  

2.  Move all file cabinets out.  (See 1.)  Otherwise people will continue to file documents, even if they have been imaged.  Old habits die hard.

3.  Remove the ability to print from all but necessary users.  If you don’t do this step, you’ll find digitally native records are being printed from the EDM and filed.  Again, old habits die hard.

4.  Integrate search of paper backlog files with the new EDM.  Users hate looking in more than one place for something.

5.  Train, train, train

I know 1, 2 and 3 sound very harsh, but they are vital steps to ensure that your organization recuperates its investment in electronic document management.  Additionally, making adherence to the records management policy of your company should be part of every job description in the organization.  Failure to adopt and follow that records policy could then be followed with disciplinary measures.

The most difficult step is integrating search of paper backlog records with your new EDM.  Until all of the legacy paper documents have been destroyed, users will continually need to search in at least two places to find documents, the EDM and the paper files, whether they are in a cabinet, offsite, etc.  This makes it difficult to find the savings and productivity gains we all want.  The only way I’m aware of to do that efficiently is to use a product that allows you to search and view both paper legacy documents and digital documents in one repository. 

We offer this service at Data Storage.  It’s called Digital Fileroom. Data Storage moves all of your records out of your office and makes them digitally available on Digital Fileroom.  Users work with new ongoing work that is in workflow in Digital Fileroom and view old legacy documents in the same suite.   We are able to do this without scanning your entire backlog of records.  The service is very inexpensive as a result.  Call me to talk about it.   918-664-6164

Lastly of course is train everyone thoroughly.  If users are not comfortable with the EDM you choose, they just won’t use it.  I recommend a second training session for everyone between 2-3 weeks of your go-live date. 

Failure to do these things can mean a failure to launch your EDM program.

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!)

Here at Data Storage, our man Dymian Kritikos (D!) is always saying, "Hope is not an audit strategy."  Time and time again we see companies that have no records management policy or procedures.   D constantly worries about these organizations.  When times get tough, these companies suffer.  Big time.  In the event of natural disasters, often vital records cannot be found.  These records might help the company collect on debts, borrow money for recovery or defend in legal actions.  In the case of audits, it's unbearable.  Audits are already an expensive, stressful proposition with the best records keeping practices.  With no records keeping strategy, it's a nightmare.  

Here's another nightmare.  Arrow Trucking of Tulsa, OK recently filed bankruptcy and is in big trouble.  No one in that organization can produce even the most basic financials. 

From the Tulsa World.

Patrick J. Malloy III, bankruptcy trustee in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma, said Arrow Trucking’s Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing last Friday is without precedent. “We don’t have a schedule of assets, a schedule of liabilities and a statement of financial affairs,” he said. “Anyone who would be capable of providing that is not available. We’re going to have to reconstruct everything. It could take weeks.”

What little value is left in the $500 million dollar company will likely be eaten up in legal fees and forensic accounting.  How far does it go before the officers in the corporation are called on the carpet?   Oops, it's already happening.  Again from the Tulsa World.

"Transportation Alliance Bank..... filed a lawsuit against Arrow and its executives last week, alleging double-billing of invoices, bank fraud, wire fraud and “racketeering” activity that cost it $12.5 million."

Hope is not a records strategy!

For many document types, scanning or imaging doesn't make dollars and cents sense.  Often, records can be stored in a traditional commercial records center for their entire useful life for approximately 1/10th of the cost to image them.  If records are no longer in use and need to be maintained for a relatively short time (5-10 years), standard archive records storage can be a great solution.

When storing records for compliance purposes, the records must be protected from pests, humidity and heat.  Inventory controls must be maintained and retention and destruction needs to be managed very carefully.  In order to meet these basic requirements, (without imaging) some choices need to be made.

 1. Where are the records going to be housed?

 2. How are going to control our records inventory?

 3. How are we going to manage records destruction?

 To get started, we'll just talk about picking a location for a business document archive.

Archive storage choices we see the most include self storage, shop space and of course office space.  Self storage is the most common.  It offers a fair amount of security.  Most self storage facilities are gated and have on site custodians that keep an eye out for trespassers.  Self storage units are also locked and access to the units can be controlled by the document manager by just being stingy with the key.  Self storage units are often one of the most economical ways to obtain space as well.  No other semi-secure space can be had in 80-100 square foot increments at such reasonable rates.

The drawbacks of storing records in self-storage are a little disturbing in my mind.  The chief of these is not knowing what is being stored in the unit next to yours.  The whole point in maintaing and keeping these documents is to protect your organization from liability, provide proof of transactions, etc.  If someone runs a meth lab out of the unit next to your records, your records could be burned, damaged or irreparably contaminated by harmful chemicals.  I have seen spills of gasoline; paint and petroleum products in neighboring units seep under walls and damage or destroy documents many times. 

Self storage units are also difficult to keep clean.  Dust, insects and moisture are constants in this environment.   This makes the self storage less than optimal for maintain viable archives.  The dust and moisture necessitate the use of shelving to get the records off of the ground to protect from ants, termites and water. 

The purchase of shelving and the transportation needed to haul records cartons to and from the storage unit further add to the inconvenience and expensive of this arrangement. 

So,

 Security, Not optimal

 Cost, check

 Protection from environment, Unsatisfactory

 Convenenience,  Not Optimal

 In the next post we'll discuss shop space as an archive facility.

The short answer is scan the active stuff and store inactive records.  

Scanning allows for easy sharing and manipulation of documents.  Collating, stapling, filing, pulling records and interoffice mail are completely eliminated when records are scanned.  Additionally, documents are easily shared after they are scanned, so, organizations with several locations can improve efficiency considerably with scanning and EDM. 

Records that are very active and require a great deal of handling offer the quickest return on investment for scanning.  

Studies we have done with our customers show that to pay a bill in the typical accounts payable process costs $8 - $12.  Filing, collating, various invoice and purchase order approvals, copying and other tasks drive this cost up.  Scanning can reduce this cost to less than $2.    We find that companies often cannot claim prepayment discounts with vendors because their accounts payable processes is simply too slow to make the 1% net 10 or 15 deadline.  One food wholesaler we helped institute scanning saved over $2,000/month in prepayment discounts alone.

Records that are scanned require no filing. (Duh)  One wholesaler and leaser of industrial equipment we help, (if you’d like to talk to them about us, call me and I’ll put you in touch with them) creates about 4,000 work orders or sales tickets per day, each of which is proof of a sale and a lease agreement.  It used to take an army of clerks to file each of these orders.  Now the records are scanned or imaged.  They are also indexed (tagged with keyword search terms) with transaction number, date, customer name, etc. so they can be located easily.  This process is saving the customer over $7000 per month.

To sum up, if there is a great deal of sharing records, if it takes more than 1 or 2 people to complete a record (payment approvals is a good example), if there is a lot of filing, or pulling records, consider imaging/scanning your records.

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.

I have talked to and helped hundreds of customers wrestle with this question.  Paperless, or less paper?  Over the next few days and weeks, we'll discuss the important factors that must be considered when deciding how to approach your records management problems.  We can't just  spend money willy nilly and force users to adopt systems they don't understand or trust.  We have to spend records management dollars wisely.  We have to roll out programs that users trust and use reliably.  

Feel free to send in the questions you face in records management.  Whether it's about EDM, scanning, hardcopy archiving, taxonomies or file folders, we'll be discussing it here, on the datastorageinc.com blog.