Pri-Med Patient Education Center - Moving Towards a Paperless Office?

By Debra Wiggs, CMPE, Director of Practice Administration Services for Patient Education Center, debraw@patientedu.org.

From purchasing personal computers for doctors to introducing scanners, technology-savvy practice administrators will have a much easier time with the changes ahead in practice management technologies if they consider the incremental introduction of these tools into the office practice. Especially as health care practices move towards paperless offices, practice administrators will need to know the tools available to fluidly transition. Introducing some components prior to full electronic medical record (EMR) installation can help acclimate staff and patients to the world of paperless health care services.

Do you wish you had some more space around the office? Is managing paper clutter a constant challenge? Is your practice spending more and more on storage fees? Digital images taken using a scanner can be instrumental in the pursuit of a paperless world … and can lead to more space for another exam room or storing supplies! Scanners are about the same price as a fax machine these days, so adding one to your facility should be an economical first step towards a less-cluttered office.

Here are some technologies that can help you and your practice go paperless!

1. Invest in a scanner, one that can scan multiple pages at once for high-volume practices or one that includes a copier/printer/fax if you need to save space. Start scanning in all paperwork to your system as it comes in, then find ways to start scanning your paper archives into the system. The biggest challenge is creating an archiving log or library system to store the records. Many practices use date and alpha file names to keep the file labels consistent.

2. Reduce paperwork duplication for physician billings at hospitals using physicians’ PDAs. Work with your physicians’ hospitals to find out what their electronic systems support. Then, investigate software that can aide your physicians in doing paperwork once. PDAs should allow doctors to download data to the hospital and again to the practice billing and/or EMR systems. They should be able to carry around and catalogue their charts and hospital rounds data to keep patient EMRs complete.

3. Ask your service providers what they can deliver electronically. Can all of your lab results go right into the system for nurses and physicians to easily access them or send them to patients? If the lab that you work with doesn’t deliver results electronically, you can still use your scanner to create an electronic file of lab results once the paperwork is delivered, then back-it-up on CD or DVD, and shred that paper!

4. Scan in Explanation of Benefit (EOB) requirements so that an electronic version is always available to your patients. Then shred the document. You don’t need it anymore as long as your system is properly backed up (check in a future issue of For the Business of Medicine when I’ll discuss security issues). CDs and DVDs take up a lot less storage space than boxes of files, and buying a burner or memory for electronic storage may cost less than two months’ storage fees.

5. Are you ordering all of your supplies electronically? Do you have a methodology for managing all of your resources electronically to the extent of keeping an asset and variable system electronically? Instead of keeping your records in the world of paper, order online and use a scanner to account for office supplies—by the bar code (eg, keeping track of samples of pharmaceuticals). The scanner can feed into your computer to streamline the process: allowing practice administrators to find accurate trends more readily with less likelihood of mistakes while inputting data.

6. Scan in patient insurance and ID information; then everyone can see it. Suddenly, information is readily available for billing and the front desk. No one has to get up and go find a piece of paper.

The idea is to create a world where no one has to go hunting for a single piece of paper with important information. By using technology, your practice staff can hop onto a screen in one department without having to travel to another to hunt for a document. The initial set-up for these systems will take some time and training, but the outcomes have the potential to improve patient care processes.

Here are some resources for your office that we are aware of. What are your favorite resources for going paperless? Let us know!

Add-on tools to improve practice management reporting:

Electronic medical claims clearinghouses that provide more than just a place to send claims:

Scanners for insurance cards:

E-prescribing solutions:

* Some of these resources are courtesy of a presentation by Rosemarie Nelson, MS, a consultant with the MGMA Health Care Consulting Group (used with her permission). The Patient Education Center provides these resources with the intention of informing our readership of some of the available information technology solutions and does not promote or recommend any of these services.

Get to know which of your patients own a computer and are tech-savvy. You might be able to reduce the amount of paperwork in your office just by guiding your patients to authoritative medical health information online. For example, the Patient Education Center online contains information that a patient can share with family without mailing paper and that can help reinforce what the doctor explains without remembering a condition-specific handout at the office.