----- Bill Creamer -----
I was with you completely until the last paragraph. Why do you think, for example, that blood pressure readings in electronic form would have a different retention period then in paper form? Could you elaborate?
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Full disclosure:  I'm not in the medical field either, but I have studied electronic health systems fairly recently.

The main difference is that the blood pressure that documented on paper was part of a medical visit form and contained other data such as weight, temperature, test results, prescribed medication, etc.  The form may contain information that should be kept long term and information that should be kept short term.  However, since it's all on the same piece of paper, it would likely be classified as an office visit and retained accordingly.

In an electronic health records system, everything is stored as data points and retained at the granular level.  If a patient visited the doctor for a bladder infection, all the data points including urine bacterial levels would be recorded in the EHR system.  Most of that information should be retained long-term.  However, the urine test results aren't meaningful beyond a few weeks.  Maybe if the infection persisted, the doctor would compare a new test with the old one.  The difference from the paper record is that the same office visit would yield a number of different records (blood pressure, weight, urine test results, etc.) and each of those could have their own retention period.

Mark Graves
Omaha, NE
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