Jerry Fahrni

HIT Consultant: “N.Y. medical group to ditch paper records by 2010 – Rep. Chris Lee toured the Buffalo Medical Group’s offices Monday as part of what he calls his effort to bring local ideas about health-care reform to Congress. Buffalo Medical Group, which handles 415,000 outpatients per year, is in the process of updating its data systems and patient records to a paperless electronic format. CEO Daniel Scully said the electronic records will replace a warehouse full of 5,000 boxes of patient record. Scully said he expects the transition to be complete by the end of 2010.” – I love this idea. It’s aggressive, it’s green and it’s much more efficient. Searching through a well indexed electronic database is much faster than looking through hundreds (possibly thousands) of paper files, no matter how well organized you are. How many times have you seen this order in a chart: “have the patient’s old medical records sent over”, or some equivalent phrase. That would be a thing of the past with a paperless electronic medical record.