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S O L U T I O N
ing through piles of paperwork or a
series of seemingly randomly
placed screens in a lesser EMR
platform, she enters her system at
the end of each day and reviews
data on the fly, which lets her
immediately catch inaccurate
entries or clinical practice issues
before they become major probPAPER WEIGHT Printing
costs have dropped signifilems.
cantly at Memorial Spine
and Neuroscience Center.
2. Time savings. Memorial's nurses call patients a few days before their scheduled procedures and manually
enter health histories and demographic information into the EMR system,
which automatically flows the data into patients' charts. "The more you can
do in advance, the less you have to worry about on the day of surgery," says
Ms. Bloode.
3. Less waste. Does improved charting efficiency lead to savings on
staffing hours? Potentially, but Ms. Bloode knows for certain that her facility's printing bill — not to mention environmental impact — has dropped considerably. "With our old EMR, we had to print out forms and scan them into
the system," she explains. "Now, all the forms are built into the system. We
fill them out on the computer and they're stored electronically."
4. Accreditation aid. Memorial is an accredited facility that has undergone multiple surveys since opening in 2007. Before EMRs, Ms. Bloode had
a great deal of difficulty navigating through charts to find needed documents when surveyors came calling. Not anymore. Just this year, the facility hosted accrediting and state licensing surveyors. Both groups gushed
about how the program streamlined the entire review process.
— Daniel Cook
N O V E M B E R 2013 | O U T PAT I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E O N L I N E
Cheryl Bloode, RN
S O F T W A R E
5 9
