Medical Records Retention and Access

A new revised physician's guide to medical record access and retention has been put forward by Illinois State Medical Society (click). Please refer to respective state medical society policies for more information. According to it, a general rule of thumb is to retain PRs (patient records) for 10 years under statutory of limitations. I thought their guidelines be more precise. 

All the older patient medical records that need not be retained are NOT scanned and sent for shredding. We decided to list the old medical files that are to be shredded in an EXCEL sheet so that patient details and the day of last visit be in our records for future access (Even with the State board guidelines, we decided to be more responsible with the patient record management). For documentation purpose we stretched retention policy to last 18 years giving ourselves an extra cushion. 

Following is a layout plan for record management:

  * Charts older than 18 years are shredded with out even scanning. Patient information (Name, DOB, Last day of visit) is stored before destroying the records.

  * Charts from last 4-18 years are scanned in to single PDF files. These files are stored in external hard drives for future access. 

  * Charts from last 4 years(active files) are scanned and saved in such a way that they can be uploaded in to EMR software.