Scanning your patient files – What is the sensible approach?
Making the switch from paper to digital archives can be a time-consuming process, but it’s a worthwhile endeavour for a multitude of reasons
From their years experience in helping GPs move to a paperless practice, Datascan has seen every approach to patient fi le scanning; from the minimalist, to the extremist.
As an outsourced document services company Datascan has been working in the information capture sector since 1993.
Orla Cafferty, Director, has been with the company since 2001 and has seen the document-scanning department grow in the last number of years. Eventually the department began to specialise in the scanning of medical documents, patient files and correspondence.
“We found that once we had successfully scanned a GPs old files, he or she would recommend us to their peers - it seemed a natural progression for us to set up a specialist medical records scan team to cater for the demand for file digitisation services”
Cafferty maintains that one of Datascans points of difference from other scan service companies is that they have chosen not to sell software packages.
Scan service
Steering away from software sales means that the company can be flexible and offer a scan service that is compatible with any of the practice management software packages.
Datascan produces scanned images that are ready to import into Socrates Healthcare, IMedDoc and many other portals.
Having assessed a surgerys needs, the company will work out a sensible approach and a realistic time frame for the scanning of old patient files.
1. Making The Most Of Your Practice Mgmt Software
Datascan recommends that a practice work out its main reason for looking at scanning. There are generally three reasons why a practice will do this but the main one is to keep the practice-management software up to date. Patient software is expensive to purchase and generally has annual licensing fees, so it is in a clinics best interests to keep it fully up to date. Fully updated patient software is a powerful intelligence and efficiency tool for the GP, staff and patients.
2. Making Space
Secondly, clearing out filing cabinets allows the medical professional to free up space for other activities in the surgery, either for storage or for patient services.
3. Data Protection Compliance
The third reason is data-protection compliance; filing cabinet areas are inherently not secure under data-protection legislation. Conversely a complete audit trail of when and by whom patient files are accessed is possible when scanned patient files are either imported into a practice management package or on to a secure server.
Having a complete scanned file for patients will also make it easy for a practice to comply with any file access requests. Datascan always recommends that GPs refer to the advice from the ICGP in this regard, which is both sensible and achievable.
Access Files Across Locations
More and more, Datascan is meeting doctors who want to be able to access their patient files at more than one location. Once patient files are digital, they can be accessed securely and remotely via tablets or iPad, or even on a smartphone.
What To Scan
Once the decision has been taken to scan old files, the practice will need to decide if it is necessary to scan every piece of paper or if it would it make sense to weed out anything that doesn’t directly relate to medical care. Factors to take account of here are legal and compliance, data protection, medical necessity and of course whether the practice has the budget to scan everything from the file.
Then, if the practice has a proper retention plan in place and has been securely destroying end-of-life files; then it would be sensible to scan all the files currently on site. Once the files are scanned and imported, the patient management system will then be used to manage the retention periods for patient files and the electronic patient file can then be treated just like the paper one.
Many surgeries seeking to go paperless will have all files since the start of the practice which means that many files fall outside of the normal retention periods and can be confidentially destroyed. Here it would be possible to scan only the younger files for import into the practice software.
Datascan finds though that when a surgery has a large quantity of old files it is more likely that the GP isn’t certain of the last date of visit of a particular patient which would mean that it would be prudent to scan and retain that file.
It will be up to the GPs in a practice to decide what to scan from each file. At the very least though, all correspondence from a patient file relating to care should be scanned including, hospital letters, test results, consultation notes and consent forms.
Datascan has found over the years that most surgeries will seek to scan the entire file contents rather than spending staff time trying to weed out items that might not be relevant to scan. Whilst the company specialises in document scanning, Datascan offers the full range of records management services from archive storage to confidential shredding.
Working with Socrates Healthcare, the company offers a weekly scanning service that gives busy surgeries the ability to import scanned correspondence into the package at the click of a button.
Datascan exhibits at many of the medical conferences, including the ICGP Summer School this year.
Orla and her team are available to offer advice on the sensible management of patient files and are happy to assess your practice requirements
Telephone 01 806 8461, Visit www.datascan.ie or email medical@datascan.ie.
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(Article originally published in the Irish Medical Times)
