The hot topic for many physician practices is the creation of electronic medical records and charts. While these are great for making medical practices more efficient, one overlooked reason for using medical records and charts is for digital storage. One costly part of a physician’s practice is the storage of records. There are laws that vary according to state about how long records must be kept. However, in general, medical records must be kept for as long as possible. From a medicolegal perspective, failure to keep appropriate records and documentation of a visit or treatment that later becomes a patient grievance is a recipe for disaster. Thus most physicians archive and store their paper charts in storage facilities for an eternity. As you can image, these storage fees can add up over the practice of a physician.
Most physician’s store their electronic records in storage facilities that run several hundred dollars per month. Depending on the volume and size of records of a practice, this amounts to several thousand dollars per year. Digitizing these records does have a cost. However, once these files are digitized they are easily accessible by computer. They do not have to be physically stored nor does anybody have to physically go and retrieve the charts.
For those contemplating going digital, I’ll do a hypothetical calculation of the cost savings for a physician practice that has 12,000 charts costing $200 per month to store. Under that scenario a physician must spend $2400 per year or $24,000 per decade. Digitizaton of these charts is not cheap but in the long run can save good money. For example, for about $2000 you can get a high quality scanner and software. Scanning the charts is what costs the most as it probably takes 5 minutes to scan a chart. Thus it takes about one hour to scan 12 charts. Thus about 1000 hours is needed to scan 12,000 charts. Hiring someone $20 per hour would cost about $20,000, which is a lot of money but less than the $24,000 the practice spends per decade in storage.
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There are a couple of blatant things wrong with your calculation that I can see:
1st – you’re 20k cost compared to the decade cost totally leaves out the time value of money.
2nd – Who do you know that makes $20 per hour scanning paper?
Better #’s are 1st, 20k * 3 percent or so assuming they just kept the money in a money market type investment is an extra cost of interest lost is $6,878.33 over a decade.
At minimum wage plus benefits and taxes (what you’d really probably pay) and the cost of interest is more like a total of 14,850.27 vs. the 2400 cost to store.
good luck!
TM
Dr. JC,
Great post.
If we could find a high-speed scanner to scan one chart in 2.5 minutes instead of 5 minutes, that would save us $10,000 for the 12,000 charts.
I wonder what the difference in price would be for a high-speed scanner versus a “regular” scanner. If the difference in price is less than $10,000, it would be worth it to buy it.
Also, I wonder if we would have to scan all the MRI and CT scan pictures from the patient charts. I hope not, because that might take more time. The xrays would be quick though, plus you can use the black and white setting on the scanner for xrays. For MRIs, you need color because I think MRIs are “green”.
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