There’s so much buzz about being paperless. The stressful thought of the transition is often what keeps practices from facing the inevitable until ultimately they have no choice. However, there is a much better approach to the matter. The concept of going paperless can have many different meanings and the process can unfold on multiple levels. First off, it doesn’t mean you can no longer use paper as long as you are in practice. Many offices have charts for the storage of old records such as original radiographs and full clinical note histories. It would certainly take a lot of time and money to scan everything into your new paperless system and, quite frankly, it’s not even a requirement yet. So why would you go through the extra trouble and expense of converting to digital images and documents when you’re not ready yet or may not be able to foot the expense for a new software system?
These concerns are valid, of course, but this is not the way to approach the whole thing. To prepare yourself, or at least to try and shift your way of thinking about all of it, you need to consider the things that are the most inefficient about your system as the top priority. Don’t even think about going paperless as if it’s this huge mountain of extra things to do under a strict timeline. For example, a common key factor of inefficiency in practices that are not paperless yet is the time wasted hunting for the paper chart or clinical note histories. By the time your staff is able to locate the missing documents to make new entries, the patient is long gone and the doctor is on to the next patient. When this key issue is addressed, it turns out to be the number one biggest time saver, making the entire system run so much smoother. So just start here! Please realize that you don’t need to scan and archive everything in your office in order to cut back on wasting time hunting for charts and records. As time goes on, the next thing to address, for example, might be digital progress notes. PANDA excels at this. Once you get into a routine of converting to paperless one priority at a time, the rest will come naturally. You’ll soon find that your team becomes more relaxed when they don’t have to scramble to find charts and records. Within weeks you will see a huge difference. When you go one step at a time, suddenly you’ll be at the top before you know it.
