Electronic Medical Records Change The Future

When I came in to work today, I knew it was going to be a good day. It is the day our eye doctor decided he would go digital. You see, I work at as a secretary in an office of eye doctors. I have heard much news about electronic medical records and how they have helped many other medical practices become much nicer and run more efficiently. As a secretary, a big part of my job is making sure everybody's medical record is up to date and filed away properly. However, converting the office to use emr software would make my job much more enjoyable. The problem here, however, is that this is an office with 3 eye doctors and only one is willing to transfer his paper medical records to the software system.

We have decided that we are going to try it out. My eye doctor, (meaning the one I work for) has another office where he works a couple days of the week. That office is a little smaller and they have already converted to using emr software, and they have had much success and are doing very well. This is one reason why he is so stubborn on converting to emr software, even when the other doctors in the office try to talk him out of it. He also shares some patients with the other doctors in the office, so if he is gone, many patients will just see one of the doctors who are in the office that day. I guess either the other doctors are going to have to learn to use the electronic medical record software, or they won't be able to work with my boss's patients.

About 4 Weeks Later
We have been using the EMR system for a month now. I have been the one in charge of scanning all the charts for the patients that we see. The process of going paperless has not been an easy one here. We see on average thirty to forty patients a day three days a week. Our doctor has seen many of his patients for over twenty years. The charts are almost overwhelming at times.

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. There are two tests that we must perform on every Glaucoma patient every six months. Then, we print these tests off and it is also necessary to check both the right and left eye. That is a step that can't be overlooked, since only 1 machine is not capable of remembering all of the information and not even one of the machines has a connection with the computers we use. Now you can maybe understand that after a few years, a very big chart can be built up by just one patient.

We have a small scanner, so those thick charts take a chunk of time to get all scanned in. We could really use something designed for more volume. Then after we scan it in, we have to move each page one by one over to the program designed for our EMR's so the doctor has access to it when he needs it.

About 8 weeks Later
We have nearly completed the process of transferring all of our records. 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.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that we are the only practice attempting to do this. We are at a clinic with several other practices. We do not have the resources necessary to convert everyone to EMRs. We would need a better system and cooperation from everyone to start a venture like that so we could completely get rid of charts for good.

Even with these minor problems, transforming our practice from paper to electronic medical records has helped out considerably. We are using less and less paper 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.