Paper storage giant Iron Mountain has come up with an interesting pitch to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Basically, they seem to be asking the CMS to more heavily consider the benefits of scanning when defining “meaningful use,” which is the criteria for receiving reimbursements for electronic medical records (EMR) implementations.
This is interesting because at the Laserfiche user conference I attended earlier this year, an SI who services the medical market indicated that document imaging was not really an important criteria for meaningful use and thus had gone with another ISV, instead of Laserfiche, for its EMR requirements. Iron Mountain is, of course, motivated by the fact that it “manages hardcopy and digital healthcare information for more than 2,000 hospitals across 43 states” and has a growing document scanning business. Nonetheless, this type of lobbying could be a good thing for our entire industry, which is one reason its nice to now have $3 billion companies like Iron Mountain participating in our space.
