Electronic Medical Records in our office

by Stephanie Patterson, RN

It is about to be a very exciting time for East Cobb Pediatrics. We are going green and will be implementing electronic medical records on March 8th 2010. Bye-bye paper and hello computers! As some of you have already seen, we have placed computers in every room in the office. This should help increase efficiency since the “chart” will now be available to the staff no matter where you are in the office. We will begin slowly so all the staff and the patients get used to the new system, so we will only see two patients a day per doctor for the first few months on the EMR. The rest of the patients for the day will still have a paper chart. This will prevent us from running too far behind schedule. The providers will have computer tablets that they will carry from room to room.

Since computers are faster than people, it will take much less time to get the “chart” to the nurses from the front desk. The content of the chart will be available to both the nurses and doctors at the same time and the record is continually updated. One of the most exciting features will be the e-prescriptions feature. All of the prescriptions can be e-faxed to the pharmacy of your choice or printed out with nice, neat, readable writing. The pharmacist will love us!

Overall, our main goal is to provide better quality of care to our patients and their families. We cannot wait to see you at your next visit.