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.
