Well, I would argue that the movement to electronic medical records is hip, not hype.

So if it’s hip to transition to electronic records, then why is this process so downright painful?  Today, most providers are focused on demonstrating Meaningful Use while dealing with a complex hybrid record environment consisting of both paper and electronic records.  This two-system environment is fraught with inefficiencies which may compromise the quality of patient care.

Healthcare providers need to break out of this hybrid world by restructuring legacy health information practices and accelerating the demise of paper using three proven approaches:

1. Intelligently scanning records on a go-forward and on-demand basis
2. Developing and implementing retention management programs, and
3. Removing medical records from hospital premises as activity levels fall off

Change is always difficult and the transition to electronic records is no exception.  But ultimately the benefits outweigh the challenges, so during HIP Week, let’s take a moment to recognize those on the front line of this transition:  the Health Information Management professionals.  And, if you’re a HIM professional struggling to accelerate your transition to electronic records, remember the immortal advice from Winston Churchill:

If you’re going through hell, keep going.

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HIP Week logo courtesy of Bells International, Inc. 2012 AHIMA and Bells International, Inc.

Everyone wants to know what’s considered ‘hot’ these days.  Am I wearing the right color lipstick, listening to the latest artists, carrying the ‘to-die-for’ bag, driving the coolest car, living in an up-and-coming neighborhood?  You get the picture.

Well I wanted to find out WHAT’S HIP today, so I went the predictable route — I ‘Googled’ it.  Here are just a few of the thousands of entries returned:

• WHAT’S HIP … IN LEARNING IN FRANCE – Once again proving that learning can be fun.
• WHAT’S HIP … IN ORTHOPEDIC IMPLANT DESIGNS – Who knew implants could be hip???
• WHAT’S HIP … AND WHAT’S HYPE IN HIP SURGERY – Definitely catchy and my personal favorite!

Well, if you’re one of the thousands of folks that manage medical records, you may know that HIP stands for Health Information Professionals and HIP Week runs from March 25 through March 31, 2012.

So just what is HIP Week?

This year marks the 23^rd annual HIP Week, formerly known as Health Information & Technology Week.  It’s a time to raise awareness and celebrate the health information profession.  For the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) and the Canadian Health Information Management Association (CHIMA) HIP Week is a golden opportunity for members to demonstrate the benefits of their profession working together to deliver quality healthcare though quality information.  It’s that simple.  To increase the awareness of HIP Week, the event was moved from the fall to the spring to coincide with AHIMA’s Hill Day, when members unite on Capitol Hill to collectively promote the importance of advancing health information management.

Fish and chips have been a popular staple in the British diet since the mid-19^th century. My mouth is watering just thinking about the flaky cod covered in a crispy batter, accompanied by deep-fried, slab-cut potato ‘chips’, made even yummier with a generous splash of malt vinegar sprinkled over the top. While vinegar certainly enhances the overall flavor of a fish and chips dinner, it’s a recipe for disaster for the motion picture industry.

Beware of Vinegar Syndrome

A few years after the Second World War ended, the motion picture industry began filming with cellulose triacetate. This new material met the rigorous safety and performance standards, but its chemical instability created a ticking time bomb, just waiting to wreak havoc on the entertainment industry. You see, as cellulose triacetate degrades it releases acetic acid, the key ingredient in vinegar and emits a vinegar smell, hence the aptly chosen term, “vinegar syndrome.”

This unlikely villain has become a major threat to film collections.To put things in perspective — a typical 1,000-ft. can of 35mm film can generate enough acetic acid to be the equivalent of 250 teaspoons of household vinegar. That’s a lot of flavor for your fish and chips!

Proper Film Preservation and Storage

Proper preservation and storage conditions are essential to ensure that your precious assets are safeguarded against temperature, light, humidity, dust and other contaminants. While there is no permanent way to stop or reverse film decomposition, the rate of deterioration may be slowed by controlling two key factors:temperature and moisture. A combination of low temperature and low relative humidity creates the optimal storage condition for acetate films. According to the Image Permanence Institute, fresh acetate film stored at a temperature of 60°F (16°C) and 40% relative humidity will last approximately 100 years before the onset of vinegar syndrome. Reducing the temperature 5°, while maintaining the same level of humidity, delays the process by 150 years.

Additionally, storage containers should be chemically stable and tightly surround the film for physical support. Boxes or cans are suitable for film storage as long as they’re made from:

• Acceptable plastics (polypropylene or polyethylene),
• Preservation-quality cardboard, or
• Non-corrosive metal.

Vented storage containers allow acetic acid vapors to disperse, thus averting damage. Since the environment inside containers also has an impact on the condition of cellulose acetate film, you should use containers that are breathable or that include an acid absorbent to effectively reduce the rate of decay due to vinegar syndrome. Your best bet is to avoid sealed metal containers that can trap contaminants released by the film and which promote the spread of vinegar syndrome. For optimal preservation, film containers should be stacked horizontally, with the film lying flat.

What’s next on the path to preservation? Well, clearly digitization would be an ideal approach to preserve acetate film; however, current scanning standards do not produce a duplicate copy with the same picture and sound quality as the original. So, until such time that the quality metrics can be achieved, film preservationists prefer that film images be transferred to other film stock since a well-developed and stored modern film print can last upwards of 100 years.

Now go out and enjoy a movie and a nice hot plate of fish and chips!

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Today, the choices to reach our customers, prospects, colleagues, the media, analysts, influencers and others appear almost endless. There’s Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and thousands of websites that you can reach from your office, home, or a mobile device, while working, surfing the net, watching TV, or even driving (gasp – I know you’re out there).

Let’s face it, social media is a critical communication channel for your employees, but it’s also a dual-edged sword for many organizations that now must define new policies and carefully govern and monitor the use of social media. So where do you begin?

Well, if you’re attending this year’s ARMA International Conference and Expo, in Washington, DC you’ve got to hear Garrett M. Graff, editor of The Washingtonian magazine and author of “The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web and the Race for the White House,” give the inside story of how content management and social technologies helped win the Presidency for Barack Obama in 2008, and the ways in which the internet is rewriting the rules of presidential campaigning.

Mr. Graff will be participating in the Future of RIM Forum, hosted by Iron Mountain’s Chairman and CEO, C. Richard Reese on Tuesday, October 18th, 11:30 am – 1:00 pm. He’ll also be joined by Jesse Wilkins, Director of AIIM, who will discuss key findings from an industry task force that describe use cases for using social and Enterprise 2.0 technologies to transform key business processes, and strategies for getting these technologies “in the flow” of work.

click here to register for the Future of RIM Forum today.

• RIM Forum: Garrett Graff, Jesse Wilkins and Richard Reese – Tuesday October 18th, 11.30 am – 1.00 pm
• Federal Records, Open Government and FOIA: How do I get it all done?
• Town Hall Questions @ 140 characters or less
• Tweeting for Keeps: Financial Services and the Social Media Archiving Conundrum

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The High Stakes Game of Records & Information Management

One of my favorite childhood memories was playing Rock—Paper—Scissors.  Remember, rock beats scissors.  Scissors beats paper.  Paper beats rock. 

While the stakes are much higher in records and information management, it’s a game that you can still master:

·         Rock: Go deep.  Stay green.

Disasters, both natural and man-made, drive home the need to ensure that IT data remains secure, but readily accessible, in order to support your mission-critical operations.  And, what better way to protect your data than to do so in a data center located underground in a limestone mine that’s geologically stable and protected from natural disasters including earthquakes, tornadoes and floods.  It’s also a smart choice from a green perspective too. The ambient temperature from the mine lowers annual energy consumption and precludes the data center from needing a raised floor as is custom.  Now that’s cool!

·         Paper:  Keep it safe.  Find it when you need it.

Today, the proliferation of paper across all businesses is simply astounding.  And, while organizations are becoming more electronic, the reality is that paper is here to stay (at least for a while).  Knowing what you have and more importantly, how to properly store it and quickly find the records you need is the key to turning a headache into a head start.  On average, your employees are probably spending about ten hours each week chasing down hard copy records.  By properly indexed your records, you’ll be able to find and retrieve them more easily. Also, to keep them safe, be sure to store your records in a highly secure facility, equipped with technologically advanced alarms, sensors and fire protection systems. 

·         Scissors:  Keep what you need.  Destroy what you don’t.

Essential to any cost-effective and compliant records management program is rigorous and timely enforcement of retention and destruction policies.  While this sounds easy, you might be surprised at how frequently organizations fail to destroy information that’s reached its retention requirement.

So where should you start?  It’s essential to begin with a legally credible retention schedule that is backed up by research and customized to meet your specific policies and procedures.  And, before you destroy records, make sure you have checks and balance in place.  Once a document is properly destroyed, all the glue or tape in the world won’t help you piece it back together.

Finally, make sure that the records which have been approved for destruction are completely destroyed and paper-based materials are recycled to ensure your information is non-recoverable.  So, those of you destroying paper using a shredding machine that creates those nice even (but readable) strips of paper, this simply won’t cut it (no pun intended).

Now that you’re ready to master the high stakes game of records and information management, why don’t you make it a clean sweep?  Grab your favorite eight-year old for a quick round of Rock-Paper-Scissors – it’s a surefire way to bring back some wonderful memories like it did for me.

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Day After: Making a Double Rebound from Disaster

Video: Proactive Preparation – What a Seven-Year-Old’s Toy Room Can Teach You About Information Management

So with calamity perched so precariously around the corner, why do so many healthcare organizations (and companies in general) continue to have such poor disaster preparedness?  Clearly, in today’s tough economic times, organizations are keeping close tabs on every dollar spent, but are the savings of a few pennies (okay may more than a few pennies), but are the savings really worth it in the end? 

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. 

Ben Franklin hit the nail on the head – it’s better to try to keep bad things from happening than to fix the bad things once they occur.  So what can healthcare organizations do to better prepare for disasters and comply with HIPAA requirements?

• Plan for the “worst-case” requirements and build a disaster recovery plan that adequately addresses your risks
• Securely archive patient records (including paper medical records, backup tapes and digital information) offsite.  Now here’s the tough part.  While you want the records offsite, they also need to be readily accessible for patient care
• Separate your primary and backup data in geographically dispersed data centers.  So, storing your backup tape 2 miles down the road at another hospital in your system simply won’t cut it
• Avoid using the same infrastructure for primary and backup sites
• Test your disaster recovery plans and processes at least once a year

And, if you find yourself at the mercy of Mother Nature or a man-made disaster, make sure you have a trusted partner or partners you can rely on when the chips are down.  The safety of your patients and staff are of utmost importance, but as you attempt to quickly recover and return to normalcy you’ll most likely need to the help of organizations experienced in disaster recovery to help get your operations back up and running.

I’d love to hear from healthcare providers who have survived Mother Nature’s wrath — please share your experiences and lessons learned.

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