Brightshores Health System, formerly Grey Bruce Healthcare Services, has a mission to build healthier communities, one patient at a time. In 1998, it brought together a group of local hospitals under one organization and has since grown by nearly 25% while expanding its health services. Today, with six hospitals in the Grey Bruce region of Ontario, Canada, Brightshores Health System sees over 100,000 patients each year.
In support of its mission, Brightshores Health System makes patient care a top priority. Part of that care relies on properly and proactively managing patient records while also complying with regulatory requirements. In Ontario, Canada, adult medical records must be kept for 10 years from the last entry date.
As Brightshores Health System grew, the increasing volume of paper patient records began encroaching on the physical space needed for patient care.
This hindered timely, efficient records access and increased storage costs. Brightshores Health System’s patient records needed cleaning, organizing, and a proactive management approach, including a records governance and retention strategy.
That’s when the regional hospital in Owen Sound and Brightshores Health System’s largest site, turned to Iron Mountain. The goal was to digitize patient records, find a cost-effective storage solution, and establish a proactive document retention strategy, along with providing the resources for implementation.
The teams used Iron Mountain Smart Sort®, Scanning, Image on Demand (IoD), InSight® content services platform on AWS, and onsite project support services. Results, such as freed up space, centralized data access, improved records security, reduced storage costs, and an ongoing document retention strategy, are equipping Brightshores Health System to adopt a digital-first strategy and better optimize patient care.
Curing the medical records challenge
Left unaddressed, disorganized medical records can impede records access, create regulatory and security risks, and inflate storage costs. Brightshores Health System faced challenges around the complexities of records governance — including retention, destruction, and ongoing use — as well as limited resources and the rising cost of the hospital's electronic medical records (EMR) system.
Iron Mountain helped Brightshores Health System gain better control and management of patient medical records. First, the Iron Mountain records management team assessed the Owen Sound facility situation, challenges, and requirements. Then, the team mapped out a plan to organize and digitize patient records, and reclaim valuable space for patient care.
The Owen Sound facility leveraged the Iron Mountain Smart Sort solution to help improve the visibility of patient medical records. Information from Owen Sounds’ master patient index and records retention schedule helped with decisions around retention and ongoing use. Records were sorted and tagged for scanning, carton storage, and delivery-on-demand storage. In addition, Brightshores Health System wanted to identify all records that were eligible for destruction and reduce risk and storage costs.
As a result, 30% of past-retention-date records were destroyed.
32K charts and 35M images
Iron Mountain Scanning, Image on Demand (IoD), and InSight on AWS were deployed at Brightshores Health System Owen Sounds facility. The overall solution is essential to digitizing patient records, including 32,000 charts and 3.5 million images, bringing together paper, film and digital records for informed patient care.
A hybrid physical-digital environment is an ongoing reality for Brightshores Health System. With Image on Demand, Brightshores can convert physical records to digital for selected records over time as needed. The InSight content services platform provides Brightshores Health System with a secure, centralized view of patient information. This allows authorized employees to access and retrieve records in a cloud repository. As a result, Brightshores Health System has improved patient record visibility with timely access, helping equip clinicians to deliver more responsive and effective patient care.
Advancing a digital-first strategy
Healthcare organizations have the added data challenge of organizing and managing highly sensitive, strictly regulated patient medical records. For Brightshores Health System, records management was not feasible with its limited pool of resources, yet risks and costs were rising. Iron Mountain solutions and support resources, together with relevant information from the Owen Sounds facility, enabled the team to handle existing patient records. Within 10 days, the team securely packed, moved, sorted, classified, and digitized existing patient charts, freeing up 8,170 cubic feet of space for patient care while meeting regulatory requirements.
With Iron Mountains’ help, Brightshores Health System also established an ongoing patient medical records management plan. To reduce a build-up of expired records, existing patient records are now organized by retention date. And new records are quickly digitized and classified to provide proper organization, timely clinician access, and cost-effective storage. This comprehensive and proactive approach is enabling Brightshores Health Systems to deploy its newfound digital-first strategy.
For healthcare organizations, patient records management is a musthave competency. By improving and digitizing its records management approach, Brightshores Health System has reduced risks, decreased costs, and reclaimed space for patient care. Alongside enhanced records access and management, Brightshores Health System can optimize patient care, advancing its mission to build healthier communities one patient at a time.
