Take it from this early adopter: All those great things you hear about how electronic medical records are supposed to improve efficiency, reduce costs and simplify medical recordkeeping are not just hype. If you put enough time, money and effort into your paperless conversion, you should be able to reap the rewards promised by health IT vendors and the federal government. From my nearly paper-free GI center, here are a dozen reasons to embrace this technology and all it has to offer.

1. It's the wave of the future. The Bush administration set 2014 as the target date for all Americans to have an electronic health record, and the Obama administration followed up by building financial incentives for hospitals and physicians to go paperless in the 2009 stimulus bill. Although ASCs aren't eligible for the same financial incentives as hospitals and doctors' offices for adopting electronic health records, it's in their interest to keep pace by also going digital. It's only logical: If your physicians, staff and patients are used to dealing with EMRs at other healthcare facilities, they're going to wonder why you're still using paper at your ASC.

2. No more cluttered records room. Going digital saves you the storage space and manpower you'd otherwise need to manage a vast archive of paper charts and records. Our paper medical records used to be stored in a series of rooms occupying an entire hall of our facility. Now we have 1, nearly empty shelving unit that houses the few paper documents we still use (mostly consents and other forms that require a patient's signature). Even those are scanned and added to the electronic records eventually. When a patient calls asking if she's due for a screening colonoscopy, the person answering the call can look that up with a few simple clicks on her computer, rather than having to call back to the records room, sift through the paper files and hope that the patient's information is up to date and hasn't been misplaced over the years.

3. EMRs can be custom-built to suit your needs. Think of going paperless as a way to fine-tune the processes you already have in place, not as a whole new way of doing things. A good vendor will build and customize an EMR system that's compatible with and, hopefully, an improvement upon your facility's existing workflows. To that end, expect your vendor to request samples of your paper records as well as flow charts and other documents that illustrate how your facility functions on a day-to-day basis. They'll use those materials to build an electronic version of what you already have, with little tweaks here and there to improve efficiency and make the best use of the technology.

Our vendor built the initial content of our EMR based on our existing paper forms. Then we worked intensively at the vendor's headquarters for several days to clean it up, making improvements in areas where the old way of doing things didn't make sense. After going live, we'd make revisions on a daily basis, then revisited the entire system again after using it for several weeks. You really can't tell how the EMR is going to look, feel, behave and misbehave until you're using it in the real world.

4. They help manage patient flow. Newer EMR systems may be able to integrate with advanced patient tracking programs that use RFID or ultrasound to automatically keep tabs on patients' whereabouts in your facility. But even our older EMR, which we first implemented in 2003, helps us track and manage patient flow through a color-coded system that shows any user at a glance where each patient is in the perioperative process. The caregiver dealing with the patient at each step manually changes the color coding to show when the patient has checked in (gray), has completed his pre-op interview (purple), has his pre-op assessment by the nursing and anesthesia staff (yellow), is undergoing the procedure (orange) and is ready to be discharged (green).

5. Enhance communication and information access. Anyone who needs to look up patient information or add to the record can do so at the touch of a button. Tracking down a patient's chart is as easy as entering a password on the computer and pulling up the EMR from any workstation. This ready access is crucial in the case of an emergency situation that may arise during a procedure, as well as for more mundane purposes like updating relatives in the waiting room of a patient's status. Eventually, the goal is to expand the portability of EMRs so that patients will have access to certain information, such as prescriptions and medical history, which they can easily share with other healthcare providers managing their care.

6. Connect with your path lab. Many EMR vendors have relationships with the large pathology companies, so you can automatically send information back and forth for faster, easier reporting. Our system also lets staff automatically generate and print out specimen labels with all the necessary information right in the OR after a procedure, which helps prevent errors.

7. Promote safe practices. Speaking of errors, EMRs can be a great patient safety tool by presenting vital patient information, such as allergies, difficult airway concerns and other special indications, in a clear, easy-to-read format for all caregivers to see. No more trying to decipher sloppy handwritten notes in the patients' chart to determine what medications the patient is taking. You can also build prompts into your electronic medical record to ensure that all caregivers are verifying the patient's information and surgical site at all the steps in the process. The system should also make the OR time out a mandatory field to be completed before the procedure can begin.

8. Keep up with compliance. Every time a regulatory agency or accrediting body updates or changes their standards, you can go into your EMR and tweak it to reflect those changes. For example, when the Joint Commission first published its new medication reconciliation requirements, we were able to work with our vendor very quickly to add the necessary documentation into the system to ensure we were meeting those requirements.

9. Simplify follow-up. One of the most useful functions in our EMRs is a page where the patient's follow-up call permissions are recorded. Each day, a medical assistant on staff goes into the records from the previous day and can instantly see who needs to be called and whether they are permitted to leave a message at the patient's home. If necessary, the system can generate a paper letter to be sent by mail. Similarly, our EMRs also generate discharge instructions customized for each patient according to the procedure findings and physician recommendations.

10. Generate reports and analyze data more easily. In addition to enhancing the efficiency of your day-to-day operations, electronic records make it easier for you to instantly generate reports on everything from case costs to compliance measures to supply trends. Some of these reports come standard, and you can easily build customized reports with just a few clicks. For example, after we recently applied for state permission to treat ASA-3 patients, I set up our system to track these patients on a monthly basis so I could report any complications we encountered in compliance with state regulations. On the business end of things, our system also lets us track endoscope usage and maintenance — information we can then take to our vendors to use as leverage when negotiating service contracts or new scope purchases.

11. Referring physicians love it. Our EMRs are set up to automatically fax post-procedure reports to the referring physician as soon as all the information is recorded. Our docs love the near-instant feedback and ease of communication afforded by this system.

12. Patients like it, too. The easier it is for all the different caregivers throughout the perioperative process to access and verify patient information on the medical record, the more time they can devote to direct patient care. Our system cuts back on minutes spent waiting for nurses to track down charts, shuffle through papers, decipher what the previous person wrote and other distractions that can leave patients frustrated.

Worth the effort
The initial rollout of your EMR system is going to be a difficult process that requires a lot of time and attention in the beginning. Expect to encounter little (and sometimes big) problems along the way, and be prepared to make adjustments as needed in the beginning to get the system working exactly as you want it to. If you choose your software system and vendor wisely, it shouldn't take long for the investment to pay off.