Digitise paper health records

Solution Guides

Iron Mountain Paperless Healthcare solution unifies patient data to accelerate data-driven healthcare insights, and reduce records management costs while improving patient data security and compliance with GDPR and other regulations.

17 January 20256 mins
Purple gradient male doctor

Healthcare provider challenge

Providers worldwide face deep shortages of clinicians, with Europe experiencing an estimated shortage of 1.8 million health workers.1 Burnout contributes to the labour shortage, with 70% of healthcare workers reporting feeling burned out.1 COVID-19 made the backlog for elective procedures longer than before. Each delay in diagnosis and treatment can decrease the health and wellbeing of patients. Providers are looking for ways to reduce costs while improving access to care. 

Impact

For most healthcare providers, patient records are created and managed across physical and digital formats, making it difficult to get an accurate view of a patient’s whole health record. These silos can lead to potential discrepancies between patient files and delays in diagnosis. According to the World Health Organisation, “Every 10th patient in Europe experiences preventable harm or adverse events in hospital, causing suffering and loss for the patient, their families, and healthcare providers, and taking a high financial toll on health care systems.”2

Healthcare providers can have multiple locations that all handle patient records differently.

Manual data input and document management, combined with duplicate care and transition errors caused by poor data quality, take significant time from healthcare staff and create inefficiencies that drive up costs. According to a report by DIGITALEUROPE, “uptake of data and digital technologies in health can, in a conservative estimation, result in a 30% decrease in waste and inefficiencies.”3

In addition, healthcare providers are required to comply with GDPR along with a multitude of other compliance regulations. The average European healthcare organisation spends 13 million EUR to maintain GDPR compliance.4

What if you could

Adopting a unified, secure platform for both digital native and digitised healthcare information would allow you to overcome these challenges by: 

  • Integrating critical healthcare information from various formats to reduce errors and enable fast, actionable healthcare insights based on the best available information
  • Reducing manual records management to increase efficiency and lower operational costs
  • Protecting patient data and optimising information management to lower the cost of compliance

Unify physical and digital records for high-impact healthcare

Iron Mountain Paperless Healthcare solution is a software as a service (SaaS) offering that combines scanning of physical healthcare documents and digital document storage, collaboration, and sharing in our secure InSight® Digital Experience Platform (DXP). The InSight DXP platform grows with your business needs as we offer a comprehensive platform enabling you to expand your capabilities as your requirements change, including the ability to increase digital storage, number of users, and functionality, such as workflow automation. The solution can help you ingest, process, and unify physical and digital patient records, so you can find critical information faster and deliver high quality patient care. This can transform your organisation by helping you: 

  • Unify your patient data: Digitise and consolidate your critical healthcare information for a unified view of a patient’s data so you can easily search and access your information in one place to make better decisions regarding patient health.
  • Optimise provider operations: Reduce burden and burnout on your staff with standardised and automated processes that free up their time, allowing them to focus on more personalised patient care while lowering provider operational costs.
  • Protect patient data: Digitisation with Iron Mountain has an auditable chain of custody and role-based access controls allow InSight DXP users to view and download only what they should, keeping your patient data safe and streamlining compliance across your network. 

1 Health Policy Watch, Europe is struggling to keep its health systems afloat, September 25, 2023
2 World Health Organization, Patient Safety, accessed July 2023.
3 DIGITALEUROPE, A digital health decade: driving innovation in Europe, April 2022.
4 IT Governance, How Much Does GDPR Compliance Cost in 2023?, accessed May 2023.