Hospitals Digitizing Health Records For EMRs Face Cost, Deadline Issues

A new survey by Iron Mountain, a company specializing in records management, has found that 78 percent of hospitals expect to continue to use paper records for up to five more years despite federal financial incentives for converting patient records to electronic formats and the electronic medical record’s “inherent promise of a paperless treatment cycle.”

Iron Mountain published the results from a survey examining different approaches taken by hospitals to digitize patient records and the difficulties they face in creating electronic medical records.

“The Meaningful Use guidelines set the clock ticking for hospitals to claim their share of the billions ...