Record Retention

Often, we receive a call from a provider who asks, “how long do I need to keep my records?”

As you can guess, it would be a management nightmare to keep only the Medicare claims for one period of time and Medicaid records for another, commercial insurance for another length of time, HMO and MCO for other lengths of time, and then private pay records for yet a different length of time.

Therefore, to avoid errors, you keep your records and patient charts for the longest period required of your payer mix, right?

Right.
 
And that time period gets longer and longer.  Our firm recently reviewed a contract for a Home Health and DME provider that required records to be kept 10 years. Therefore, make certain you check all your payer sources for the time period records must be kept.  This was a Medicare MCO plan, but the plan administrator wrote into the contract a time period much longer than Medicare records are typically kept by providers. If record destruction is part of your regular business process, do not push the “shred” button too soon.

You are shredding them, aren’t you?  The PHI (protected health information) contained in those records is HIPAA protected and the destruction process must ensure that information is not disclosed.  There are many shredding companies that will shred on site rather than taking the documents back to their warehouse for storage and shredding.