Dear Tamar,

Thank you for your prompt reply. We appreciate your attention to this matter, and look forward to hearing from you. Please do let us know if anything is unclear, or if you require any further information.

Best regards,

Daan

From: Tamar Gabunia

Sent: Saturday, March 23, 10:23 AM

Subject: Re: Archive outsourcing for Georgian medical institutions - regulatory change

To: Daan Harmsen

Cc: Ryan Millikan, Tatia Broladze, George Akhalkatsi

​​Dear Daan, 

Many thanks for your e-mail and brining these issues to my attention. I'll explore the background and get back to you soon. 

Sincerely, 

Tamar Gabania 

From: Daan Harmsen <daan@drm.ge>

Sent: Thursday, March 21, 2019 4:27 PM

To: Tamar Gabunia

Cc: Ryan Millikan; Tatia Broladze; George Akhalkatsi

Subject: Archive outsourcing for Georgian medical institutions - regulatory change

Dear Ms. Gabunia,

I hope this e-mail finds you well. I am writing to you from Dasta Records Management, Georgia’s first professional records management and archive outsourcing company.

I wanted to ask your support regarding an issue that we have been working on together with the MOH for quite some time now: updating order 198\ნ of the MOH, to allow hospitals  to outsource their document storage. We believe that your help could be very useful in moving this issue forward, especially since it seems that we are at the final stage already, and just need a last push.  

In this e-mail, I will provide some information about Dasta, a brief summary of the relevant order, and an overview of our engagement with the MOH so far.

Background on Dasta

Dasta is Georgia’s first professional records management and archive outsourcing company, founded in 2014 by a group of Georgian and international investors. We operate a world-class document storage and records management facility in Tbilisi, serving Georgian and international clients such as TBC Bank, Bank of Georgia, Carrefour, Georgian Water and Power, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, and Sanofi. This video will give you a better idea of what we do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQoXccCbpxg&t=1s

Summary of MOH order 198\ნ

Order 198\ნ of the MOH mandates that hospitals store their documents in their own buildings, and sets forth a number of archival storage requirements. From our understanding, this order was created in 2002, because hospitals were using basements and rented garages to store their documents in very poor conditions. Please see the full text of the order here: https://matsne.gov.ge/ka/document/view/54136?publication=0

This order has caused significant pain and lost revenue opportunities for local healthcare providers who have been asking to outsource their archive storage for years now, to optimize their archive management.  We believe that this has the opposite effect of the original intent of the order: instead of moving their documents to a modern facility like Dasta’s, hospitals instead store their documents in the same basements that the order intended to prevent them from using.

In fact, a number of hospitals have reached out to us, expressing their interest in using Dasta’s services, and have written support letters that we sent to the MOH.

A brief overview of our engagement with the MOH

We first started our conversations with the MOH regarding this topic in early 2017, and have since had meetings regarding this with two of your predecessors: Deputy Minister Nino Berdzuli, and Deputy Minister Maia Laghvilava, and a number of other MOH officials. We sent an official request to change this order, including a number of support letters from hospitals, in February 2017. We also provided a memo regarding recommended changes to the order in November 2017.

As we understand, a changed draft order was sent to the Ministry of Justice in June 2018, and the order has since been reviewed by both the National Archive and the Ministry of Justice, and the ball has now been back in the MOH’s court since November 2018.

Next steps

From our side, we have done as much as we could, and we have had some intermittent communication with your colleagues Marina Darakhveldidze and Natia Noghaideli, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem that much progress has been made.

In the meantime, we cannot provide services to hospitals that really want to modernize and optimize their archive operations by outsourcing to Dasta. Your help in this matter would be greatly appreciated.

We would really appreciate it if you could check on the progress of changing this order, and help drive it over the finish line.

Thank you for your attention, and we look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,

Daan

DAAN HARMSEN

CEO at DASTA Records Management

A 15 Gr. Lortkipanidze Str., Tbilisi, Georgia

M +995 577 134412   E daan@drm.ge

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