I'm a doctor with a large practice. Why should I convert my office to an Electronic Medical Record, or EMR, system?
Using Electronic Medical Records (EMR) is a business continuity tool. Let’s suppose you’re running your business on paper charts. You have 20 years of patient data in your charts and very little stored electronically. You may say this works and your practice is successful.
What happens if your office gets struck by a fire, flood or theft? If it’s a fire or flood, you would lose all your patients’ charts. Your patients would come into the office, or wherever you relocate to, and you would have no history on them. You won’t know what symptoms they had when they first visited your office, what you diagnosed or what meds you prescribed. You would look like you were born yesterday. Some of your patients might put up with you and your staff asking introductory questions. Some won’t. They would walk out and find another doctor.
If it’s a theft, you have an even bigger problem. You would have to disclose to your patients that their nonpublic data has been compromised. This is part of federal and California HIPAA laws. This would create quite a panic among your practice. As if running a successful business wasn’t challenging enough these days, you would be without patient data and under legal mandates to tell your patients about the theft. I had a dentist panic because his staff fielded 17 calls in a row from patients canceling their appointments. What would you do if that happened to you?
Whatever the case, you’ve lost your patients’ trust. Someone would eventually ask “what is your business continuity plan”? If you’re running your business on paper charts, you probably don’t have a business continuity plan. You could end up out of business from the loss of data and from patients doubting your competence.
That’s where electronic medical records could have saved you. Your patients’ data will be saved electronically and can be backed up online every night. You can control who will have access to that data in your office and know that it is backed up with military grade encryption.
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