Healthcare IT Update

Physician practices that are implementing EMR dish on how ‘easy’ it actually is.

With all the hype out there about converting from paper records to EMR, I’ve heard very little about how that process actually happens. That’s why I appreciated heating Kris Cuddy’s nuts-and-bolts EMR implementation session at the Billing & Collections Conference in Orlando this week.

And I REALLY appreciated comments from physicians and office managers at her session about what it’s really been like for them to implement EMR at their practices. They have a perspective you sometimes don’t see in all the glowing predictions about how great EMR is going to be once we all adopt it.

Three hours, said one workshop participant. That’s how long it took him to transfer his first medical record from paper to EMR. Subsequent conversions are going more quickly, but the office manager says…