Administrative costs account for over 25% of the total expenditures of healthcare clinics and hospitals. A large portion of this goes to paperwork involved with billing, coding, records, and insurance. Each patient visit adds to the already voluminous paperwork healthcare providers have to deal with on a daily basis. What’s more is these medical facilities are obligated to maintain all these records for at least 10 years after any patient’s final visit. With the amount of information that practitioners have to manage, how do you ensure your own practice’s reliability, accuracy, and efficiency in keeping patient records?
Many healthcare providers are discovering the benefits of digitizing their patient records and other related paperwork and adopting the appropriate document management system, which, in a lot of ways help reduce the cost of paperwork management and at the same time ensure document processing speed and accuracy.
Cost efficiency is one of the most obvious benefits of document management systems. Facilities that have already switched to digital record keeping systems cut spending substantially in terms of reduced material and equipment costs, reduced storage needs, reduced retrieval fees, and smaller staffing costs. Well-designed healthcare document management systems also ensure information security and regulatory compliance. Paper documents are prone to damage due to natural disasters and accidents, ranging from mold to fires, flooding, and other incidents. Physical damage to paper-based documents are usually irreversible rendering patient information non-recoverable. Electronic document and file systems have redundant storage features and highly efficient disaster recovery solutions, making sure that all information stored can be recovered one way or another. Even when a particular server fails, there are digital backups that practitioners can turn to so important information can be recovered when needed.
Document management systems also provide a level of protection no paper-based file system can offer, that is a detailed chain of file custody, wherein timestamps and employee names are recorded on each stage of the document processing. This means extensive protection of patient information confidentiality.