White Papers for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)

HIPAA Patient Information Security and Privacy Mandates: Strengthen Business Case for Electronic Report Distribution Systems

O'Pin Systems

As argued here, document management and compliance is one of the major challenges facing HCOs (HCO) in the new HIPAA environment. An important part of the HIPAA gap analysis process should involve examining the entire range of their printed reports, whether generated by legacy systems or newer
applications, and evaluating how these reports are distributed and accessed against the new HIPAA "minimum necessary" standards. Even a medium sized HCO today may generate upwards of 1,500 regular reports from 10 to 15 more different computer systems in multiple locations. These reports are then
distributed to many hundreds of users throughout the health care organization, frequently to widely dispersed locations. In addition to determining and managing compliance with the "minimum necessary standard," there is the added burden of assuring the security of these physical documents as they
move around the highly open and sometimes chaotic environment of the HCO.Most HCOs have no clear idea of how many reports they print and distribute, who they go to, or what their current process costs them. It is not uncommon for a medium sized HCO to print 1-2 million pages per month, 12-24 million pages per year. At 5 cents per page, the cost would be $600,000 to $1,200,000 per year. When softer costs and benefits are included, such as the value of having information on time and the productivity increase for information users, the economics benefits increase even further.

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