For years, whenever we began launching a medical record review project, clients and physicians alike would ask us the same question:
Why can’t you come onsite to pick up the requested records?
The easy answer would have been to say that we simply hadn’t performed record retrievals before, but we had vested interest in doing just that. Fast forward to the year 2015, and we were discussing the prospect of officially performing medical record retrievals for an array of both established and new clients. By 2016, our vision came into fruition and we began retrieving medical records across the southeast.
We launched by dispatching medical record specialists to physician offices in nearly a dozen counties. The medical record specialists were equipped with portable, HIPAA-compliant scanners, encrypted USB storage devices, and what we refer to as a “pull list”. The pull lists were housed and secured electronically, either within the USB storage device or within a company-issued laptop, and contained information on selected patients, provider details, and the date range for which we were instructed to pull.
Even though we had undertaken the task of retrieving and reviewing such a high volume of records in order to verify payment integrity and documentation accuracy, we found that many physicians still don’t have a handle on patient privacy or protection standards – especially when it comes to the physical security of records or data management.
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