Thursday, June 16, 2011

Paper Avalanche!!!


My Mingle cave looks horrible.  This is what happens to people when they're solely in charge of responsible for the ridiculously slow transition to an electronic health record system.  The little bread-box looking thing on the top-right, sitting on top of a brown box, is actually a sheet-fed document scanner.  It's still off in this picture, so it must have been before I started scanning (honestly cannot remember).  

It was nice having a volunteer help me for a change.  I think I've flipped through thousands of pages, counting pages and removing duplicates.  One of the many unfortunate side effects of paper charting is that the way for other facilities to send you patient info is via fax, which someone inevitably misplaces and will require another fax, but just in case we ask the patient to bring in paperwork too, and so we end up with three copies of everything. 

It takes my ancient computing device about 3-5 minutes to scan, save and rename an individual patient record depending on the number of pages in that file.  If I scan files non-stop and have a volunteer help prep each chart for scanning, I can scan about 100-120 charts in an 8 hour work day.  So far I think I've gotten through 450 out of our total 5100 patient charts.  Wahoo! 

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