1- I believe it is Federal (Medicare) not state that says you now store the paper for 10 years not 7. For sure in California it is 10 years as of Jan. 2007. I am not sure where the law came from. (but hospitals got exempted from it, grrrrr.)
2- You will pay cash money every month, by the square foot to store the charts as paper.
2.1- If you die or retire you will continue to pay cash money to maintain these records for 10 years. Or you will pay the purchaser of your practice in the form of a concession on the sale price of your practice.
3- ANY software for managing the stored paper is fine, as long as you can retrieve it when needed. We use "Capture Perfect" because it was free with our big Cannon scanner when we bought it.
4- SCANNED records are available anytime you want to sit down and page through them. Thank God it is true that this is a very rare event. Agree that a patient gone for 2 years is not likely to come back too often. (I do see that, but it is not a reason to save charts.)
5- the paper charts that you are paying to store will likely only be of interest or use to the plaintiffs attorney.
6- You must give your staff the tools to do the tasks you have assigned them. We dragged our feet for a pitiful 6 months buying only one extra scanner because we thought when the charts were all gone we wouldn't need more scanning capability than we already had with the multiple 'all in one' printers that are in the office. Finally we bought TWO more high speed scanners because staff were waiting in line for the two we had. The return on investment is probably measured in 3-4 months just on the salary of staff working at a lower potential with inferior tools.
So I still say, for RuralPeds, just scan the old records into AC and shred the paper. Be done with it. If you have a larger bulk of paper than I envision you might use a second system for old charts, but I don't think you have that many. (Leslie does, but she just doesn't want to face the task ahead! :-) )
