Electronic Health Records For Dummies

Figuring costs and benefits

After you assess the readiness of your staff to adopt EHR and figured out the cost of time spent working with paper charts, you can apply what you know to actual financial figures that help you put a real-life value on moving to a paperless EHR system. Here are some of the tasks that cost you real money based on time spent performing them:

Speed of staff recording intake information

Trips back and forth to file room or drawers

Looking for missing files

Duplication of work effort because of missing or incomplete files

Time spent tracking down missing lab reports

Prescription faxing and refills

Chart pulls for phone calls, faxes, and follow-up

Performing records requests

Physician chart pulls

To figure the actual cost of day-to-day charting activities, add the number of minutes each staff member spends on those tasks and then multiply by the pay scale of that particular employee. No matter who performs the task, the cost is probably pretty high.

Although having an office staffer do some of this work might not seem expensive, saving him a few minutes here — or a moment there — adds up to real money that you shell out.

Other hard costs are associated with your “classic” paper-based system, and these are related to the money you spend on actual material goods and services. Consider the price you pay for

The paper itself

Folders

Labels and stickers

Square footage ...