Whether you have a fully electronic system for managing patient data, paper-based records or a combination of the two, the challenges are the same. You need to make records easily available to those who need them, protect them from disaster and privacy breaches and worry about how to have enough room for them all. Many vendors specialize in the management of physical records from organizational tools to access control for records rooms. For records that don't need to be stored onsite, such as those that are unlikely to be retrieved frequently, offsite storage services may be a good way to increase security and free up floor space. Offsite service providers that specialize in medical record storage understand HIPAA and other healthcare compliance requirements.
Converting to an EHR, EMR or other digital patient records doesn't solve the storage issues. At one time, having a terabyte of data was considered a milestone. With the advent of electronic patient records, medical images from PACS, EKGs, or other systems and document imaging, some hospitals now generate multiple terabytes of data in a single month. Specialized hardware and networking expertise helps you plan and monitor storage capacity and performance.