Friday, May 1, 2009

Making The Decision To Go Paperless

Most of the medical practices are now using an electronic practice management (EPM) system. These products have typically been proprietary software, in a great departure from simple pegged ledgers and hand-written calendars. Within the last twenty years the EPM market has mushroomed into a huge industry full of products running on a variety of platforms.which are mostly driven by text, did well. The more graphically and visually-oriented specialties such as ophthalmology were quite a bane to the EMR developers, and more than a few medical practice consultants still maintain that ophthalmological EMR systems aren't ready to go live.So we faced an important decision: will we use more space or consider eliminating paper records? The question: would it be more cost-effective to convert to an EMR system? At our practice of five office spaces,When calculating the final costs of software, tech support, hardware, and infrastructure, we expected it could be recovered within five years. This was based primarily on the abated need to rent more office space, including reductions in clearing-house services and lower print costs. Improvements to job efficiency and other benefits are difficult to accurately calculate, but we are monitoring these types of returns on investment as we go forward. we use a central records storage area within the main office. considered a scanning solution to help reduce our storage quandary. However, we realized we would have to before more efficient without limiting our access to older stored data.