Today we are going to talk about being paperless in your practice.  If you aren’t paperless yet you are missing out on a great time saving device as well as being more organized than you could possibly be when you have a lot of paper.  I have been paperless since 1993 and would not practice in a facility that was still using paper.  Too many things get lost and it is almost impossible to read 99% of the veterinarians hand writing.  It also looks very unprofessional in my opinion when you print off hand written records.  I had the first AAHA approved paperless medical records back in the early 1990’s.

Many people ask me “How do I go paperless?” and I just say "do it".  There is never a good or bad time to do it you just have to make the decision to do it.  The first thing is I would make sure you have a computer system software management package that will allow this.  I have used the old PSI (Cornerstone) dos version, E Friends, and now currently using DVMax .  They all worked for me but I believe DVMax is the best medical record of any of them.  There are a lot of software packages and I am sure that most of them will allow this today.  You then need to decide what to do with all the old records.  You can use both systems till you have your paper files empty and every time someone comes in scan all of the records into a file.  The other possibility is to scan all records from then start.  The problem with this is you may scan a lot of records of clients that may never come back again.  Remember anything you do not scan has to be saved somewhere for 7 years.

Most of the programs today take blood work results from in house or from an outside laboratory and download them into the medical records.  There is never a chance of blood work being lost or misplaced.  When someone has a question for a Doctor about a patient the Doctor can go in the record from any computer and look it up while he/she is talking to the client.  A receptionist doesn’t have to put the client on hold, pull a file, find the Doctor and give him/her the file, and then wait while the Doctor goes through all the paper work.  Most of the programs put charges in as you enter medical records so fewer charges will get missed.

The advantages far outweigh the disadvantages and so I don’t know why everyone doesn’t go paperless.  I assume soon it will be mandatory for clinics to be paperless.  It doesn’t do a patient any good if there are multiple pages of records that no one can read.  Make a decision to change and go paperless and you will agree it will be one of the best decisions you have ever made in your practice.