26 Jul Electronic medical records in record time
Recently, many more legal and insurance professionals are outsourcing medical record retrieval in order to more quickly obtain records for their insurance claims or legal cases. But do you know why the process can often take so long? Let’s delve deeper.
History of Electronic Health Records
Medical records as we know them today date back to the 1960s, when doctors first adopted “problem-oriented” records. These helped an entire healthcare team, and not just the doctor, coordinate a proper treatment plan for a patient and were often completed on paper.
In the 1990s, the progressively widespread use of the internet made accessing health information online easier than ever, which set the stage for the adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) at healthcare facilities across the country.
Today, medical records are becoming increasingly paperless. According to the Commonwealth Fund, three out of four hospitals in the U.S. have adopted at least a basic EHR system, but many still have not fully adopted and instead use a combination of paper and computerized records. This adds some extra challenges when working to obtain medical records for legal and insurance purposes, but that’s how hiring a medical record retrieval service like American Retrieval can help.
How it all works
When we receive a request for medical records, our account representatives work directly with the record custodian to obtain that record. Many may think that since we’re in a digital age where most things are computerized that it’d be easy and fast to obtain medical records, but it can often take a bit more time than you’d expect.
If a facility is still using a combination of electronic and paper records, it can be challenging to pin down all available records for a patient because they are often not housed in the same chart or even at the same location. In addition, though many healthcare facilities do use an outside copy service to fill any incoming requests for records, roughly 25% don’t use one. That means, the facility’s employees are the ones tracking down records when a request is submitted on top of all their other job duties, which can dramatically slow down the process.
On top of all this, HIPAA guidelines make obtaining records even more challenging, as the patient’s privacy must be protected at all times. American Retrieval has the ability to take any record, paper or computerized, and convert it into an electronic document saved to our secure, HIPAA-complaint portal where you can then search, annotate, OCR, and Bates Stamp each document with our add-on services. This is all done for an affordable and simple rate.
Outsourcing record retrieval
You may be asking, “why can’t I just have one of my employees do record retrieval in-house?” Well, because every healthcare facility has different processes and procedures, it can be difficult for someone with few connections in the industry to obtain records in a timely manner.
In order to obtain these records, you’d have to login to many different systems and then sometimes login to each copy services’ portal to download records. The hassle of doing record retrieval in-house is why American Retrieval is here to help. We make record retrieval easy so you and your staff can get back to doing what you do best – winning cases for your clients.
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