If you missed us yesterday, you can check out the podcast of MU Live! with Tripp Weeks and Ryan Ricks of DataSourceMD. Tripp and Ryan discussed the challenges physicians face managing data in today’s healthcare environment. Click here to listen to the podcast.
MU Live! is hosted by Jim Tate and Roberta Mullin. Jim is a nationally recognized expert on meaningful use. Roberta is a managing partner of HITECH Answers. Please click here for more information about Jim, Roberta, and the MU Live! radio show.
MU Live! is a 30-minute program airing every Tuesday at 2pm EST. To tune in, go here and click on the “Listen Live Now” link. If you miss us, you can hear the show re-broadcast at 6 am, 2pm, and 10pm EST everyday.
]]>Tripp Weeks and Ryan Ricks of DataSourceMD will be appearing on MU Live!, an internet radio show that discusses breaking news related to meaningful use, as well as other health IT topics. Please join us on Tuesday, April 30th, at 2:00 PM EST as we discuss issues related to data conversions, data retention, and how they relate to audits and malpractice issues.
MU Live! is hosted by Jim Tate and Roberta Mullin. Jim is a nationally recognized expert on meaningful use. Roberta is a managing partner of HITECH Answers. Please click here for more information about Jim, Roberta, and the MU Live! radio show.
MU Live! is a 30-minute program airing every Tuesday at 2pm EST. To tune in, go here and click on the “Listen Live Now” link. If you miss us, you can hear the show re-broadcast at 6 am, 2pm, and 10pm EST everyday.
]]>Physicians face many challenges when it comes to long-term medical record storage. Paper charts are impossible to back up, and they are easily damaged by fire, flood, mildew, and other environmental factors. Changing Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems often results in data loss. Furthermore, physicians who retire, sell, or close their practice and work for a hospital do not want to pay EHR vendors to manage legacy data for the next ten years.
How can physicians best manage their data? One solution is to keep legacy EHRs online for 10yrs, but this is expensive and uneconomical even for large hospitals. Data extraction and conversion usually requires professional expertise and programming skill. The best policy is to extract data and store it as a series of human-readable flat files and folders and save it on an encrypted portable hard disk. This approach does not require any special software or training to access the data; it is EHR-vendor agnostic, so changing vendors or terminating contracts will not impact availability. There is no long-term contract or re-occurring fees.
The first step towards long-term data storage requires purchasing the proper hardware. Multi-terabyte USB hard drives provide great storage; they are available online or at most electronics retailers at very low prices. We recommend purchasing two identical drives, one for yourself, and another for your legal council or escrow service. The next step is to protect the drive with military grade, whole-disk encryption. Be sure to encrypt the drives before copying over any data. Take proper care to manage your encryption keys. If they are lost, your data will be completely inaccessible.
Accessing extracted data from a human-readable flat file system is easy and simple; it will work on any computer with a USB port, so you can always access your medical records when you need them. Please contact Tripp Weeks at tripp.weeks@datasourcemd.com or 678-361-4464 for more information. DataSourceMD provides vendor-agnostic HIT solutions for professional liability insurance companies, private practices, hospitals, laboratories, billing companies, and other players in the healthcare industry. Please feel free to contact us for more information about our products and services.
]]>Failure to consider medical record retention laws is a common pitfall that could lead to legal liability when switching EHRs or acquiring practices. HIPAA specifies retention for six years, CMS has different storage requirements for cost reports and managed care records ranging from six to ten years. State laws vary from five to ten years. Under the False Claims Act, physicians can be sued seven to ten years post care. Most experts recommend storing inactive adult medical records for ten years and inactive records of minors until they reach majority age, but what does this have to do with switching Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems?
As it turns out, switching EHRs has a great deal to do with record retention laws. In the world of paper, records can sit around on shelves with no issues. EHR is more complicated, because it is rare that all information entered into a system can be exported. Even with the compatibility standards required by Meaningful Use, it is still very difficult to convert data from one EHR to another.
As a result, some health systems are required to maintain fully functional legacy systems if they switch EHRs or acquire other practices. This may include preserving older server operating systems, applications, databases, and of course, the data. It is extremely expensive to maintain legacy systems and retain the expertise necessary to support them. Is there any way to avoid such a fiscal pit?
DataSourceMD has developed a comprehensive strategy to tackle this problem. We begin with a comprehensive data dump where possible, and use robotic “screen scrape” technology for vendor systems that hold data hostage. Next, we parse the data and sort it by patient last name, first name, and unique identifier. Then we render all the patients’ information into common human-readable file formats, like Microsoft Word or PDF. We build a C-CDA document for discreet data, and finally, we save all documents uniquely named and in chronological order in a simple flat file system, where each patient has one folder. This is basically the same way a paper chart works.
Our solution allows for easy storage and backup; no legacy EHR resources are necessary. The flat-file system is also intuitive and easy to use. No one needs to know how to use an obsolete EHR when retrieving old charts, all you have to do is navigate to the appropriate patient folder. It is also easy to share information with other providers, insurance companies, or auditors. Simply add the requested patient folder or just those documents of interest to an encrypted zip file, and you are ready for a HIPAA-compliant data transfer.
Postponing a decision on your document retention strategy not only costs you time and money, but it may also needlessly expose your practice to legal issues. Please contact us at 678-908-3543 or info@datasourcemd.com. You can also visit us on the web at http://www.datasourcemd.com for more information about our data extraction services, or click here to sign up for our newsletter. We look forward to hearing from you.
]]>Currently we are conducing market research on iPhone, smart phone, and tablet applications.
We would like to know what sorts of medical tools you would like to see rendered as an application.
Please click here to complete a brief survey to share your opinions.
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