After 20 years of paper charts and an entire room full of file cabinets, the amount of time we wasted physically moving peices of paper from one workstation to another was driving me nuts. I hope that after a year of this that we have very few paper files left. Our current rule is that any paper chart that has been pulled from the cabinet for any reason does not get refiled, it gets scanned into AC and then shredded. That goes for incoming labs, reports, anything. I agree with Leslie, for the majority of patient visits the note is finished with orders, prescriptions and instructions all printed and waiting at the front by the time they walk to checkout. My charting time at the end of the day is maybe a fourth of what it used to be. I am not very good at coding the visit and haven't worked out what to do with that, so I still send a printed charge slip with the patient to check out with.
I am loving it.
