Many offices have been telling us that they will just scan their medical records in-house, I respectively disagree with doing this. Yes of course this is what I do in business but have you thought about all the hidden costs associated with scanning in-house?
Here is a list of things to think about…
Do You Have The Equipment
If you do great, you are a step ahead. If not, a low end scanner costs about $1000. Now you do need a scanner going forward and can be a great resource for scanning in the future. Scanning bulk projects with that $1000 scanner is not effective though, very very time consuming, which leads me to my next point….
Do You Have The Employees
I know exactly how hard working many of the employees are in medical offices. They are usually over worked as is (worked in a medical office for about 3 years), do they need to be coming in on weekends to scan? Do they need to scanning in between their slow periods of the day. Well of course they can but that is just going to burn them out, if they are not burnt out already!
The next thing the doctors/office manager brings up is that “I will hire employees just for the scanning”. Scanning although simple in the concept, is a very detailed job. First off who is going to train your employee to do this? Which again brings me to my next point…
Quality Of Scanning
You want to scan your medical records just once, if there is something wrong with the record which can easily happen without the proper training, you will have to go back, find the document and scan it again! Which is time and money to do this.
Cost Of Scanning
I know scanning costs a good chunk of change, but you will be more paying more in the hidden costs than outsourcing the scanning job. I sometimes tell the doctors to break down how many years worth of charts we are scanning, with the amount of NPs and Doctors. On a per doctor per year basis the cost is not as much as you think.