As a medical Billing and coding company, we have experienced the importance of Medical Records management time and again. And we have engaged ourselves in helping our clients manage their medical records efficiently to help with easy retrieval of the same as and when required and thereby improving patient services and medical billing quality.
What is “Medical Records Management?”
Indexing Medical Records or Medical records management is the process of organizing, storing, and retaining patient health records (PHI) for a period of a minimum of seven to ten years as per the US federal law. While this can be a cumbersome and challenging task for physicians and medical practices, e-care guarantees to handle them as a backend support and provides easy retrieval of medical records as your medical billing partner.
What is included in Medical Records?
A medical record contains patients’ personal and health-related information which is highly crucial and confidential. Access to these data in a timely manner is highly important to ensure advanced medical diagnosis and treatment based on the patient’s past history and medical conditions. These medical records also help in effective medical billing and coding services as they include:
- Patient Demographic information including contact and personal details
- SSN and other confidential information
- Medical History and past results including scan and test results
- Preventive care, immunization, and vaccination details
- Major Diagnosis, allergies, health conditions, and chronic medications
- Family history and insurance details.
This information is highly confidential and physicians and medical practices handle them and are completely responsible for ensuring they are protected being HIPAA compliant and abiding by the US Federal law.
To comply with the US federal rule of Medical records many practices and billing companies have opted for digitized storage methods as managing Paper claims needs huge storage capacity and can be cumbersome to handle for multiple locations, and aging paper records can lose their quality affecting the importance of the contents involved in the reports, moreover, with every usage and access to the files there are possibilities they get missed or replaced. However, these challenges are completely curbed by the digitized medical records namely the EMR and EHR, and leverage below benefits:
- Safe and secure medical records management
- Helps improve patient care and medical billing and coding quality
- Improves claims processing and medical reimbursement
- Reduce storage hassles and provide immediate and easy access
- Helps improve billing accuracy and reduces denials due to a lack of documentation
Medical records management at e-care
At e-care, we have streamlined process flow and guarantee the best results. Outsourcing to e-care can bring high efficiency and accessibility to the required medical records as and when required. Our process includes:
- Getting access to client’s software or medical records to index them as per client’s requirements.
- Our team starts indexing medical records to respective folders and sub-folders
- Frequently checked index records for accuracy and quality
- Send periodic reports with updated status.
Partnering with e-care helps reduce medical records indexing challenges and increase accessibility.