We now know that the ancient Egyptians (you know the Pharaoh-types) used a paper like material, the Papyrus to document their medicinal techniques, which included among other things eating ochre or medicinal clay for various intestinal symptoms. We also know that much later the Chinese discovered the use of paper as we know it today. In the healthcare industry similarly, many hundreds of years ago (we are using a relative scale here; for example, a minute is considered too long an interval in the digital world) clinics and physicians used the paper charts to document patient care.
They in the process spent $100,000 a year to keep maintaining this mountain of paper. They also spent a considerable amount of their precious time in diving into this gargantuan heap looking for the record of a particular patient they were seeing at a particular point in time. To boot all of this, they of course misplaced, lost, or sometimes used some of them as “burger wrap”. But then everyone got wiser and the HITECH act of the 1990s pushed all and sundry along the path of EMR usage. Of course things became highly efficient after 1 AHD or Anno Healthcare Domini.
Average maintenance cost, for example, for each of the patient’s charts got slashed by 75% from around $8 per year to $2 per year. Physicians and other staff were spending less and less time in searching for patient records and could also access them from anywhere, anytime. Medical Billing, that all important function in a clinic, which yielded bread and wine for the physicians, got more efficient with lesser errors. And to top it all, the physicians were being paid $ 44,000 (in other words top moolah) for getting EMRs installed in their offices. Certainly then, it looks like the healthcare industry has entered the land of milk and honey.
So it really begs the question, why, oh why ? some of the clinics and physicians are still stuck in a time warp and have not yet started using an electronic medical record, but instead using paper, papyrus, bamboo sticks, and the like.
So, unless you want to be singled out by UNESCO as practicing an ancient trade, and thus showcased for all posterity, call us BillingParadise at 1-888-571-9069. We’ll get you an EMR for a fee which may be less than what you pay for your monthly Big Macs.
