Hospitals don’t always plan for ’hybrid’ EMRs

As hospitals transition to electronic medical records, many are not adequately planning for the intermediate period when they might be running dual paper and electronic systems, a records management firm says, based on results of a survey.  "I don't see a real, well-defined way of dealing with the hybrid [paper-electronic] world," Ken Rubin, senior vice president and general manager for healthcare at Iron Mountain, told InformationWeek Healthcare. Instead, Rubin said he sees kind of a "no-man's land" between paper and digital recordkeeping. "We see a haphazard approach to scanning [paper records]," Rubin said, referring to a survey of hospital-based information managers. Boston-based Iron Mountain released survey results earlier this month just ahead of the first anniversary of the publication of the final stage 1 rules for "Meaningful Use" of EMRs.