Local Hospitals Adopt Electronic Medical Records Across Practices
By Ashley Smith, The Telegraph, Nashua, N.H.
Apr. 20–Much like getting dressed in the morning, going to the doctor is one of those shared experiences that many of us, if asked, would recall in a similar way. We get there and check in. Fill out paperwork. Wait a while. Eventually, we’re called into the back by a nurse carrying a manila folder. When the doctor arrives in the exam room, he jots down a few notes, maybe even writes a prescription we can’t read.
Things probably played out this way when you were a kid, and when your parents and grandparents visited the doctor. But the routine is changing for good in the digital age.
As part of a nationwide shift to more technology-based health care, local hospital systems are ditching paper in favor of electronic medical records. The technology is already in place in Nashua at the main campuses of Southern New Hampshire Medical Center and St. Joseph Hospital, but it’s being rolled out now in their affiliated practices throughout the region.
That means some noticeable differences for patients visiting their family doctor or an outside specialist. Instead of writing on a paper chart inside a manila folder, the doctor may type your information directly into a laptop. He or she probably won’t hand you a prescription at all — but send it to the pharmacy electronically.
“Other than that, I’m hopeful that they won’t see anything different than a physician that is more comfortable with their office practice,” said Dr. Joe Heyman, board chairman-elect of the American Medical Association.
Converting to “electronic medical records” simply means storing all new patient information on a computer instead of in paper files. No new paper records are created after the switch, although by law the old ones can’t be destroyed for seven years.
Implementing EMR within a hospital or doctor’s office is the first step to adopting an electronic health records system — which breaks through the walls of a single medical institution and makes it possible to transfer patients’ records (with permission) between health-care organizations.
“We have plans in the works to get there eventually,” said Joseph Bamforth, director of information technology for Foundation Medical Partners, the group of Greater Nashua practices affiliated with Southern New Hampshire Medical Center. “But the initial focus is an internal one.”
Foundation Medical Partners equipped the first of its offices with EMR in late 2006 as part of a pilot program, Bamforth said. The plan is to introduce the technology to the rest of them over the next couple years.
St. Joseph started a pilot study in June in the Merrimack office of Dr. W. Stewart Blackwood, the family practitioner said, and will introduce the technology in other offices beginning in the fall.
According to Kathy Bizarro, executive vice president of the New Hampshire Hospital Association, most hospitals in the state are in the process of implementing some form of EMR.
A technological shift began in the ’90s as hospitals moved to the computerization of information, but has taken off as the first decade of the century winds to a close, Bizarro said.
“The surge is amazing,” she said.
However, Heyman agrees with published reports that only about 10 percent of hospitals nationwide have implemented electronic medical records. Although technology has been identified as a key priority within the American medical community, we’re still lagging behind European countries.
“You have to remember, most people in this country receive care from small hospitals or practices … with five or fewer physicians,” Heyman said.
Doctors say the benefits of EMR include easy access to a patient’s medical records — all of a hospital’s information on a person is stored in one place and can be accessed by doctors from home.
Electronic prescriptions save time and help eliminate dispensing errors caused by illegible handwriting, they say.
Blackwood said EMR systems automatically spot drug interactions and send alerts to a doctor when a patient is overdue for a test or a procedure such as a colonoscopy, mammogram or tetanus shot.
But the technology isn’t cheap — ranging from thousands of dollars for a small doctor’s office to perhaps millions for a hospital system, according to Heyman. And the implementation process isn’t always easy.
“A lot of the resistance comes from the physicians themselves. We’re slow to adapt because we’re creatures of habit,” said Dr. Rob Dorf, a family practitioner for Foundation Medical Partners.
But when asked if they would go back to the old way of doing things, all four doctors interviewed for this story said no.
Foundation’s Dr. Ellie Chuang, an endocrinologist, said her nurse puts it this way: “If someone came in and told her she had to go back to paper charts, she’d be greeting people at Wal-Mart.”
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