Friday, May 1, 2009

Choosing To Switch To A Paperless Medical Practice

Most medical practices now use an electronic practice management (EPM) system. Usually this means some type of proprietary software, something different than the old system of hand-written calendar notes. In the last twenty years, the EPM market has ballooned into a large industry,The first vendor we were using said that they would not extend technical support after the year 2000.This includes reduced service costs and printing expenses. We are monitoring changes in job efficiency. There are benefits which are difficult to calculate accurately, but we are always measuring our performance and return on investment. There will be an initial investment of both time in expense which should reap benefits in terms of future productivity.Also consider the costs of training staff, and the extra data entry that they will perform to move information over to the new system. In most cases, a practice will use both the new and old systems until a conversion is complete. There could be some tasks duplicated between the two systems. We decided to change to another system before this happened. While the software was good for billing and scheduling, we started to realize that we would need to keep growing in terms of square footage, in order to accommodate the storage of medical records.