I’ve been squawking a lot lately about my newfound joy of a personal life outside of the office. But I just can’t get over how much better my life is since I mastered the use of my EMR system, Practice Fusion. This is not a post about Practice Fusion specifically, but using electronic medical records in general, and time management above all else. I have to bust a little on the old guys here.
Try as I might not, it’s just too easy to imagine an older doctor with a huge “experience” ego bubble, thinking they are too good to lower their “standards” to work with a computer entry terminal as opposed to “looking the part” that they imagine themselves to needing to appear as when seated in front of their patients with a paper chart and pen in hand.
I can imagine that if you were totally inexperienced with electronic records then there is a reasonable likelihood that you will go slower at the beginning of using them. However, as I have found, this doesn’t last. And soon, believe it or not, you develop new skills that make you more efficient using an EMR than you ever were using pen and paper charts. I have my nights and weekends to myself, rather than playing catch up with painful chart documentation after seeing 80-90 patients during my average week. The payoff has been far greater than the transient inconvenience of learning a new trick.
Dr. West is an endocrinologist in private practice in Washington, DC. He completed fellowship training in Endocrinology and Metabolism at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. West opened The Washington Endocrine Clinic, PLLC, as a solo practice in 2009. He can be reached at doctorwestindc@gmail.com.
