Going paperless: How two doctors cut out the paper trail

Two physicians -- one with practice experience, one just out of residency -- talk about how they're attempting to rely completely on computers to run their offices. It's not easy, especially when the rest of the world insists on using paper.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. Oct. 14, 2002.

In 2000, Susan Andrews, MD, a 50-year-old family physician in Murfreesboro, Tenn., and three other physicians formed their own group practice and shifted their individual paper-based practices to a paperless environment. Their hospital owner, Middle Tennessee Medical Center in Murfreesboro, had told them it was abandoning the physician practice management business.

"We took it as an opportunity to jump into electronic medical records and totally change how we did things," said Dr. Andrews, who has practiced for 21 years. She and her colleagues at Family Practice Partners bought an EMR from Seattle-based Physician Micro Systems Inc. and use wireless laptops to document patient encounters.

Faced with converting thousands of paper records into an electronic format, the physicians decided against scanning entire charts into the system. The process, including hardware and installation costs, would have cost $94,000.

Instead, the group decided to enter only the data they considered to be essential, including patients' medical histories, allergies and immunization records.

"After about six months, the majority of patients had been entered, and we didn't need their charts anymore," Dr. Andrews said. "After a year, we did not have to pull charts except when we needed to look at an old EKG."

Scanning thousands of charts in their entirety would not only have been expensive and time-consuming but also inefficient. "It would have been more trouble than it was worth," she said. [...]