Healthcare reform is on everyone's mind. Making Paper Easy is proud to present the third in a four-part series of articles addressing the benefits and challenges of making the vision of well-implemented digital patient record a reality.

The following is excerpted from Petra Beck's article, “Get a more complete picture of patient health.”

Clinical and administrative staff have more worthwhile things to do than chase paper. And guesses due to missing or late information can cost lives and resources. The benefits add up quickly.

The cost savings potential for a hospital implementing digitized patient records can range into millions of dollars:

• By reducing the time spent by clinical personnel involved in filing and retrieving hardcopy patient records.
• By reducing storage space. Most hospitals measure the volume of patient paper files in miles or tons.

Consolidation of patient information can streamline communications with healthcare payers and speed up billing cycles:

• By improving hospital and practice workflow via more efficient processing.
• By accelerating the routing of information within the enterprise.

Electronic medical records can enable a higher quality of care and patient satisfaction:

• By providing instant access to all relevant patient information for a more effective diagnosis.
• By reducing the time wasted searching for and consolidating patient information from multiple sources to allow doctors and nurses to spend more time on patient care.
• By reducing the risk of errors in treatment and medication.
• By increasing the consistency of patient care.

Efficient processes in hospitals and doctor’s practices speed up patient treatment:

• By shortening the time between exams and procedures, patients experience reduced waiting times and stress.
• By eliminating delays caused by slow transmission of paper documents, hospitals can reduce the length of stay for patients.

As you can see, virtually every stakeholder in healthcare stands to benefit from the implementation of digital patient record management via infoimaging.

i/oTrak is committed to making paper easier. We are a Kodak Authorized Info & Photo Scanning Equipment Reseller and Document Conversion Center. We offer a range of back-office services to help businesses of all sizes with their document needs, including E-Z Scan, E-Z Store, E-Z Shred, and E-Z Send. For a complete copy of Petra Beck's article featured in this series, click here.