Today a doctor decided that he wanted to go digital. I work in an office of eye doctors. We have three doctors and only one of them is willing to make his charts paperless. He has decided that electronic medical records (EMR's), if executed properly, will cut down on costs. The obvious thing would be that we would use less paper, but less obvious would be getting rid of the people in the basement who file charts.
Even though the other doctors aren't completely convinced about doing it, we are still planning on converting our office. The doctor that wants to use emr software has another office in a smaller town that he travels to twice a week. In that office they have already started using an emr system and couldn't be happier with it. Even though he has shared his results with the other 2 doctors in this office, they are still leery about trying to use emr software with their own patients. The other doctors will have to learn how to us the system because many times a doctor isn't available for their specific patient and have to be seen by one of the other doctors. This means that I will have a large task in trying to help the other doctors become acquainted with the new system. This gives me a good opportunity though to be able to convince them that the system is helpful when I am teaching them how to use it.
About 4 Weeks Later
Transferring all of our paper records into the new system has not been a very easy task. However, we are already beginning to see how the software is really going to speed things up around here. The other doctors are still critical of the new system, but even they have seen how it can be beneficial as well.
The problems have been minimal, however Glaucoma is a large problem that we just can't avoid, and I don't mean the disease but the process of recording information about it. Unless you have worked in an eye doctor's office before, you probably don't realize how big a chart can get for someone who has Glaucoma. Every patient with Glaucoma has to come in about every 5-6 months. Then we must perform two tests: an HRT and a visual field. Once we perform these two tests we need to print these tests off and normally both eyes are tested. There is just no way to get around that, since only 1 machine is not capable of remembering all of the information and neither machine is connected to the computers we use. Therefore, after not so many years, our practice has tons and tons of information on each patient's chart.
In order to place the charts in a digital format we use a small scanner to get them all loaded. This process can take a lot of time, especially since our computers aren't exactly the latest and greatest in technology and can take extra time loading each chart from the scanner to the system.
Two Months Later
Getting our office on electronic medical records is almost complete. I did not foresee when we started this venture, the problems that we would have, like our practice management software going down. We had to call for all the charts that we did not have because they were scanned. That does not happen too often thankfully, but those patients had an extra wait that day.
Since our practice is joined together in a large clinic with other doctor's practices, the largest problem that we have is that we are the only practice in the clinic trying to transform our practice into a completely digital one. In order for the system to work better, each practice needs to adapt to this new system.
Considering these problems, converting our office from charts to electronic medical records has helped out considerably. We have less filing and it has become much easier to prepare for the next day's appointments. In the next meeting, I am going to propose all of our doctors go to EMRs and then maybe word will spread that EMRs are the way to go.
