Over the life of a patient’s medical record, it will grow to be an average of 50 pages in size. It will have a combination of hand written notes, facsimiles, printed emails, and various other forms of documents. Over its lifetime, the patient record becomes cumbersome and difficult to work with. Every time a staff member needs to access a patient’s record, it costs you money, and worse, adds an element of risk that something will be lost during handling.

In the modern world, these files are often required by more than one person at the same time, and in different physical locations. As people become more transient and insurance companies require more and more due diligence, the patient record has become a dynamic shared document. Even with state of the art facsimiles, the quality of these critical documents is steadily degraded as they get sent back and forth between institutions. Worse, they can sometimes be sent to the wrong person entirely.

As the average life expectancy increases, the time patient records need to be kept increased. As a rule of thumb, to meet statutory and insurance requirements, records should be kept for up to ten years after the death of a patient. As a practice continues, this patient record retention becomes a substantial cost and risk. The cost of retrieval for simple queries has been estimated as $75 per retrieval (The Gartner Group).

Price Waterhouse determined that professionals spend 5-15% of their time reading information but up to 50% looking for it. This holds true to patient records. Due to their need to be shared, long retention life and requirement for consistency they have become a major cost.

By scanning patient records, the overall cost can be reduced, and primary risks associated with paper records mitigated. The issues of storage, retrieval and collaboration are removed from consideration as everything is scanned at source, and electronic versions provided to associated people.