The Dec. 31 deadline to meet the M-19-21 mandate is quickly approaching and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services along with the Environmental Protection Agency are turning to tracking tools to help them achieve their goal of going paperless.
“Are we going to be 100% compliant I would venture to say no but good enough and close enough absolutely,” said Susan Little, Director of Records and Information Systems at CMS during FCW’s workshop on electronic records management this week. “Showing our intent as agencies and being able to document and outline that for NARA will be beneficial to all of us.” …
Shadow programs have been another major obstacle for CMS. Different groups inside the federal space assume their documents are not records and based on that assumption they just run them through a scanner.
“We are working on a chain of custody standard operating procedure to track a paper record to its digitized format,” Little said. “The process involves business owner approvals and a higher level of team approval that verifies that the scanned document is in fact the same as the paper document before any kind of paper destruction happens.” … Read the full article here.