Paper Charts - The Biggest Culprit

Going paperless in a medical office usually means one thing - deploying an electronic medical records system (EMRS). Ideally, the EMRS will eliminate the need for paper charts. Typically, paper charts make up the bulk of the paper in the office. Like most clinics, we have a room devoted to storing charts - and it seems to get smaller everyday.

Besides the fact that paper charts take up some much real estate, they are also very easy to misplace. Note that I said misplace and not lose. We don't lose charts, but we spent a lot of time looking for misfiled charts.

The plan was to scan our paper charts and select an EMRS that would work with the scanned charts. It also has to work with a single-physician pediatric practice like ours but still be able to handle growth. The system must be able to adapt to our workflow.

More on this next week.

Introduction

My name is Gene Carangal and I am an administrator for a pediatric clinic in McAllen, Texas. I created this blog to chronicle my journey towards my ultimate goal - a paperless office.

It all began in September 2004. I asked a professional filing company to give me an estimate for the following =

• Create a more efficient workflow for my billing manager


• Change staff workflow for overall reduction of clutter


• Filing cabinets to accommodate growing volume of paper files


• Updated workstations to have easy access to needed files

Their estimate - $2500.00 for consulting fees and $3000.00 for furniture.

I did not call them back.

I realized that the problem was paper. If all the paper was scanned into digital files, we wouldn't need all the additional furniture. And I could teach the staff how to work more efficiently working with digital files instead of paper.

More on this tomorrow...