Document Scanning Blog

As if the medical community needed more proof that electronic medical records are a necessity, last week’s devastating tornado in Joplin Missouri made that point loud and clear.  A recent article from the Daily Mail reported that winds carried debris up to 70 miles away from its place of origin, including medical records and x-rays from a local hospital which were found in Greene County, Missouri.  

 

According to the National Weather Service, the damage caused by this twister made it one of the worst natural disasters in Missouri’s history, and the deadliest tornado to hit the United States since 1953.  It’s not every day that a storm packs winds of up to 198 mph and affects the lives of so many people, but as these storms become more common, the medical community is increasingly convinced of the need for electronic health records. 

 

 

The call for healthcare organizations to scan medical records goes beyond the HIPAA privacy laws, which are certainly a concern when records are strewn over a 70-mile radius; it also speaks to the need for keeping a patient’s x-rays and other test results in a single electronic health record (EHR).  When patients are in need of emergency care and their records are inaccessible, doctors could easily put a patient at risk by prescribing the wrong type of treatment or medication.

 

It shouldn’t take a storm of this magnitude to make medical practitioners think long and hard about medical records scanning.  In fact, most major hospitals are already on board with this technology.  If the x-rays that were lost in the Joplin tornado had been scanned and saved to the patients’ electronic health records, they would still be accessible from any healthcare facility.  When emergency treatment is needed, EHRs provide clinicians with valuable patient information to aid in diagnosis and treatment.

 

 

Other businesses can learn the same lessons from this tragedy.  Any office that had traditionally relied on paper files could suffer irrecoverable damages from an unexpected natural disaster, whether it is a tornado, flood, hurricane or wildfire.  Document scanning and web-based digital recordkeeping allows organizations the flexibility to run their day-to-day operations from any computer with Internet access. 

 

Find out how your healthcare organization or business can be prepared for the unexpected by enlisting the help of Scantronix, a nationwide document scanning an e-document storage company.