Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Going fully electronic- questions.

Am trying to go fully electronic. So far have paper charts as backup for ac. Usually print all my notes and letters and manually fax to primary physicians. Labs are scanned into AC, as are all notes and other patient documents. I use the offsite backup feature from AC and also do a simultaneous backup on a hard drive. Are there any other issues I need to look at before discontinuing paper charts?

We use a brother multifunction fax and are printing close to nothing now. I write my referal letters and save them. I tell my MA they are done and he faxes them without printing any hard copies. Labs are put imported into the patients chart without printing. I am sending many scripts electronically without printing. The only thing I am still printing are orders for labs and xrays that the patient carries to the hospital to have done. I did not scan in my patients old charts. I mined the data the night before I saw the patient. I carry the old record into the exam room in case I want to look for something from the past that isn't clearly looking at me in the electronic chart. I don't even open it most of the time. The last thing we did was stop printing a duplicate of order and we are now using the tickler file in V5. If I write a letter to a patient I send it snail mail so I print that. We are pretty paperless. Staples is very disappointed in us.

Romi,

Hi. It's difficult to tell if there are any other issues as we don't have enough information. Part of it depends on your simultaneous backup. What hard drive? Is it external or on the same computer, etc. From what you are saying so far, I don't think you have enough redundancy to go paperless.

Sooner than you think your scanned files are going to become 5GBs are more, and you will not be able to back them up off site. Now, you have only one backup.

Hi Bert,

Thanks for the input. I am currently backing up externally to a wd 500 gig hard drive. The only other backup is the ac offsite backup. Any suggestions on shoring up the backup so I can take the paperless route with confidence?

Regards

Thanks for the reply. Had a few questions:
a) How do you save the referral letter so that the MA can fax it later?
b) How do you use the tickler file (?) in V5 of ac?
c) Are you using the erx feature? In that case are you the only one in the office with access to this or can the staff use this? Also, any success with erx for mail order rx e.g. medco etc. (don't know where to send these as they have 2 or more addresses each).

Thanks.