About One-Half of U.S. Hospitals Save Their Medical Records Forever

Storage of healthcare data in the "cloud" is an important topic to understand. Although the use of this technology for all healthcare data is important, it is particularly relevant for the storage of radiology and pathology imaging data. For additional details about cloud storage, you want to review my past notes on this topic. Last week I signed up for a webinar on this topic sponsored by Iron Mountain, which is in the healthcare data storage and protection business. This lecture is available for your review (see: Leveraging Cloud Storage: Store More and Spend Less for Medical Image Archiving).

All of the material provided by the two speakers was useful and interesting. One of the points that interested me the most was the assertion that about half of all hospitals save all medical records, presumably electronically, forever. The rationale behind such a policy is that the legal storage requirements for various components of the medical record such as clinical lab data or radiology images vary considerably. It is thus easier for hospitals to store all of their data forever rather than researching and complying with the individual patchwork of storage requirements. This makes total sense to me, given the relative ease and cost-effectiveness of computer storage of data and particularly cloud storage. However, keep in mind that Iron Mountain is in the business of selling cloud storage and this statistic comes from them.

This brings me to my last point. The presentation and PowePoint file linked to above certainly has a commercial bias. It''s very good content but it's still a kind of commercial for the company. My preference for webinars sponsored by various companies is for them to be neutral and unbiased in tone. This may turn out to be an irrational hope. I still think that the cloud storage lecture is worth a look but consume it with proper consideration of the source.

Comments

[Judson]

I would have estimated higher than 50%, but just based on personal experience. For the total EMR data, I wouldn't assume it's electronic sadly... even if it's being stored forever. :(