Most medical offices today are using an electronic practice management (EPM) system. This software is a far cry from its paper-based ancestors, the appointment and ledger books. The EPM market has expanded over the last twenty or so years to include a variety of products on several platforms. And increasingly we are witnessing the digital revolution in electronic medical records (EMR). Unfortunately, while many such systems have been implemented, to this day a truly paperless office seems like a pipe-dream.
For subjective-objective-assessment-plan (SOAP)-based patient care, the first generation of electronic medical records (EMR) systems worked well. Medical specialties which are primarily text-oriented tended to fare better, as compared to graphic-oriented specialties such as ophthalmology. At our practice we have used an EPM since 1983. But although this software met our needs for billing and scheduling, we were still accumulating stacks of paper records which required an increasing expense just to store the paper.
As we considered a change to an electronic medical records system, our practice compared the expected costs for paper records storage to the costs of converting to a new system. We fully understood that we’d have to become more efficient to make the transition cost-effective.
System Implementation Costs include:
- Infrastructure
- Consulting
- Software
- Hardware
- Tech Support
We also included the cost of additional work-hours which will be spent training people on the new system, along with data entry. In most cases a practice uses both the old and new systems concurrently until the entire conversion is complete. In the meantime, there could be some redundant tasks.
The primary factor in our decision to switch to EMR was based on the need to reduce the growing mass of paper we were storing. And it didn’t hurt to hopefully ride the wave of financial incentives from the government for EMR implementation. Meanwhile, there was the opportunity to proactively implement new HIPAA privacy and security guidelines in a way that would work best in our practice.
System Benefits Include:
- Improved Communication
- Better Efficiency
- Improved Compliance
- Enhanced Documentation
- Justifiable Coding
- Improved Integration
At our practice, the business choice came down to the belief that we could recoup our investment in approximately five years. This calculation was based on the savings of projected storage space costs, along with reduced needs for printing expenses and services. The journal Health Affairs found that the average primary-care practice recovered its costs in 30 months.
It is more difficult to measure the value of change to job efficiency and changes in staffing patterns, but we are monitoring these factors to accurately measure returns on our investment. Some studies have shown reductions in medical records staffing of 0.25 – 0.5 full-time equivalents (FTEs) as well as significant savings in dictation costs.
The overall trend seems to be toward a world where EMR is the norm. Insurance companies and government are placing more pressure on health-care providers to standardize medical records, and EMR could soon become obligatory. Costs are dropping as more businesses adopt the technology; soon even the smallest practices may find it cost-effective to ‘go paperless’.
[Update 2012] We now have just over 3 years’ experience with our EMR system. We started with a gradual rollout and now see 100% of patients on EMR. Even our original naysayers are happy since they each have their own templates and can’t imagine going back to paper charts. Is it perfect? Are we hiccupfree? No. But the efficiency gains we have seen are real and practice wide. If you hear about a practice that laments their conversion to EMR, they have probably failed along the way in their implementation process – it’s usually not the fault of the EMR system but a people or planning problem.
