medicalrecordsmanagement


 * Term:** Medical Records Management


 * Description:**

Records Management is the field of management responsible for the efficient and systematic control of the creation, receipt, maintenance, use and disposition of records, including processes for capturing and maintaining evidence of and information about business activities and transactions in the form of records. There are needs to store paper and electronic records; automating, capturing, storing, and disseminating these records is important. A record policy must include a policy, standards and management. It must be broad enough to meet standards for compliance, to be legal admissibility, to be secure and private and must be capable of demonstrating this compliance. Records management is typically the domain of librarians, archivists and govt. bureaucrats. Some types of records that need to be managed in healthcare are paper records (regular, facsimiles, laser printed, dot-matrix), x-ray images (scans, dental images, etc.), and electronic (email, various file formats, databases).
 * __Definition__**

Some issues of record management are the rising costs related to storage of paper and electronic information. There are risks incurred by a lack of paper and electronic records management. Records management may not be viewed as a critical function. Records are not seen as assets and there is no clear policy or procedure. Functional silos inhibit flow of information or there is a lack of training, tools and guidance for end users. Paper records take up space and are visible. Electronic records, however, are not visible. There is a problem of employees functioning without training, rules, procedures, or a standardized organizational structure and make decisions about what records to create, keep, or destroy as they manage their email and computer files. Sometimes decisions are made without legal view. Most employees keep almost all documents and email they create and/or receive and have devised their own personal filing systems.
 * __Medical Records Management Issues__**

Some records management benefits are they preserve a historical record and protects vital information. There is protection of information that supports effective decision making. Medical records management reduces operating costs by promoting effective use of storage. There is an improvement of efficiency and productivity. It controls creation and growth of records. It ensures regulatory compliance. It also minimizes risk of litigation and ensures audits and compliance. Some of the functions of records management include capturing, storing and disseminating medical records. The capturing of medical records includes the specific information as well as the metadata and retention period of the record. The metadata includes the unique id of the record, the time that the record was created, author, etc. In order to successfully store the medical record, it must be classified correctly to assist in retrieval. The record must be consistent, secure, provide authorized access, and provide accountable management. The dissemination of the record includes the method, tracking and two factor security: authentication and authorization. Accurate estimates of the quantity of obsolete or redundant data being stored are difficult to make. Records that are retained unnecessarily increase the costs associated with producing records to comply with requests for open records or for litigation. The cost of migrating records to other media or to other formats as changes take place in technology is supportable only for records of value. All data that is stored is backed up regardless of value. Because data is backed up by “mirroring”, any useless data is kept in two places doubling its negative impact. In the event of disaster, a larger amount of data slows the restoration process
 * __Medical Records Management Benefits__**


 * __Risks of Unmanaged Medical Records__**