Contactless Medical Record Fulfillment
Each year in the United States, 99,000 deaths are attributed to healthcare associated infections that cost a total of $6.5 billion annually, as the World Health Organization Reports. At the same time, workers in hospitals and other healthcare settings are at a higher risk for infectious diseases than the general population. Unfortunately, the coronavirus pandemic could make this situation even more acute. So what can healthcare providers do to protect patients, other requestors, and front-line employees during the release of information process?
- How COVID-19 may spread through the physical handling of medical records, billing records, or medical images
- How contactless medical record fulfillment and release of information solutions can help protect patients, as well as clinical administrative staff
- What contactless medical record fulfillment and release of information is
- How ChartRequest offers secure, cloud-based medical records release and general health information exchange
- The benefits of ChartRequest’s contactless health information exchange solutions
- The contactless, secure, and compliant HIE plans ChartRequest offers
COVID-19 May Spread Through the Physical Handling of Medical Records
Your hospital is an essential business that’s responsible for the health and safety of hundreds, if not thousands, of patients and employees. Currently, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s more important than ever before to protect vulnerable patients, front-line healthcare professionals, and support staff. After all, these individuals are in an already risky environment where they could come into contact with contaminated surfaces or people who are contagious.
In fact, the CDC advises that older adults and people with serious underlying medical conditions may be at a higher risk than others for severe illness from COVID-19. Similarly, healthcare workers and support staff are among the professional groups with either a high or very high exposure risk, according to OSHA.
On top of safety protocols you’ve already put in place to protect those in your care and employ from COVID-19, you also have to make sure you’re in compliance with local, state, and federal guidelines regarding the coronavirus. Using personal protective equipment, maintaining social distancing, and disinfecting often-used surfaces regularly are critical. However, in hospitals, these measures don’t take into account the possible transmission of the virus through the physical handling of medical records.
Protect Your Patients and Staff With Contactless Medical Record Fulfillment and Release of Information Solutions
According to Healthline, COVID-19 can survive for up to four days on screens and paper. So it can easily be transmitted when one person — like an administrator — hands an object — like a hard copy medical file — to another person — for example, a physician. Unfortunately, disinfecting every single hard copy medical record is a time-consuming, labor-intensive task that doesn’t even guarantee the elimination of the virus.
Moreover, disinfectants could impact the legibility and integrity of paper records, damaging them and rendering them useless. This would make it impossible to recall patients’ medical histories, which play a key role when physicians are developing treatment plans, when medical insurers are calculating reimbursements, and when life insurers are determining premium amounts.
Considering that hard copy medical records are so vulnerable, it’s clear that contactless medical record fulfillment and release of information is the only viable solution for health information exchange that ensures records aren’t damaged while at the same time always protecting patients and staff.
What Is Contactless Medical Record Fulfillment and Release of Information?
Contactless medical record fulfillment and ROI is a health information exchange process that eliminates the need to physically touch any medical files, thereby reducing the risk of spreading the COVID-19 virus or other pathogens.
It can be accomplished by storing all medical records digitally in the cloud, as well as establishing secure ways of requesting and transmitting the relevant data from and to electronic devices such as desktop computers, laptops, tablets, and phones. Because no actual physical handling of the request documentation or medical records takes place in this process, the virus can’t be spread.
Moreover, if you enable online payment, you can invoice patients and other requestors electronically. Because they can submit payment over the internet, there’s no need to physically handle invoices or money. This greatly reduces the number of hard copy checks your staff has to handle and process, which decreases the chances of them coming into contact with contaminated documents.
Secure, Cloud-Based Health Information Exchange
With contactless HIE solutions from ChartRequest, your patients and staff never have to physically touch medical records, invoices, or payment methods again. This in turn greatly reduces their potential exposure to the COVID-19 virus — helping keep requestors and employees healthy while reducing your organization’s liability.
To enable contactless health information exchange, ChartRequest leverages a robust and secure cloud infrastructure, along with cutting-edge software. Once your HIM department has uploaded all of the digitized health information records to the secure cloud, it becomes possible for requestors to have the requested information delivered to their devices, regardless of their location. Then requestors can access the medical records on their own devices whenever and wherever they need to. As a result, it’s no longer necessary to physically share documents, which in turn reduces everyone’s risk.
ChartRequest’s cloud is protected by state-of-the art security technology that ensures the storage and exchange of all health information is HIPAA compliant. And because all of the data is cloud-based, you never have to worry about hard copy files getting lost, stolen, or damaged due to a fire or flood.
Benefits of ChartRequest’s Contactless Health Information Exchange Solutions
- Transformation of manual tasks into automated processes: This reduces the risk of exposure and minimizes the amount of time spent on medical record fulfillment and release of information.
- Streamlined release of information workflows: With all of the data digitized in the cloud, it becomes easy to streamline and automate HIE workflows.
- Accelerated medical record request fulfillment: Thanks to increased automation and streamlined workflows, it takes less time to fulfill medical record requests.
- Detailed, itemized audit trail of touchpoints for each request: Eliminate guesswork about who accessed records and when with the visibility provided by the audit trail.
- Reduction of ROI overhead costs: Automated tasks and processes reduce the time and effort spent on release of information — and as a result reduce your labor costs.
- Online invoicing and payment: Without the need to handle hard copy invoices and payment methods, exposure to contamination is eliminated.
- Expedited and accurate reimbursement: Precise, automated timekeeping facilitates faster, error-free reimbursement.
- Elimination of costly status update communication: Secure messaging allows users to communicate in real-time within the platform.
- Increased operational efficiencies: Automated pricing and invoicing, real-time audit logging, and other useful features enhance your efficiency.
- Release of information dashboard: Get visibility into request demand and performance so you can proactively address needs.
- Easy implementation: Unburden your IT department with our EMR-agnostic platform that doesn’t require a complicated install.
- State-of-the art security: 256-bit SSL encryption, 2048-bit private keys, and AES multilayered encryption for patient records provide top-level security.
- Double verification of every medical records request: This ensures each release of information is HIPAA compliant.
- Reduction of mail into your facility: With fewer hard copy requests and checks coming being delivered, there’s less handling of potentially contaminated materials by your staff.
Contactless Secure Health Information Exchange Plans
- Self Service includes automated pricing and invoicing, real-time audit logging, secure messaging, website integration, dedicated landing pages, double QA review, bulk request uploading, disclosure accounting, staff ReCentersource, transition training, and requestor and pricing support.
- Self Service + provides everything the Self Service plan offers, as well as integrated faxing, EMR integration, automated clinical hold, real-time automated alerts, multilocation single sign on, multilocation landing , and enterprise dashboard reporting.
- Full Service includes everything the Self Service + plan offers, as well as a dedicated production team, dedicated customer success manager, and best-in-class turnaround times.
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