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Going paperless doesn't have to be painful Date published: 3/7/2008
BY CATHY JETT Dr. Ross Girvan grabs a digital tablet as he starts his day at Fredericksburg Foot & Ankle Center. The podiatrist uses the 31/2-pound electronic device, which is about the size of a sheet of letterhead, to pull up patients' charts and check any notes before entering an examining room. Yesterday, new patient Donna Tucker of Stafford County said she'd been experiencing pain when she walks, as if a rock was permanently wedged in her left shoe. "That's pretty common in cases like this," said Girvan, who suspected an abnormal bending in one of her toes. He ordered an X-ray, which was scanned into the office computer system. The image of Tucker's toes appeared a few minutes later on a monitor in the examining room and was available on the tablet as well. Girvan noticed that one toe appeared slightly higher than the other, scraped a callus off the sole of her foot and asked one of his staff to bring in a metatarsal pad. Then he pulled up a billing sheet on the tablet and noted everything he'd done. As Tucker was leaving, his staff printed out the statement along with her credit-card receipt. Other than forms she filled out when she came into the office, which were scanned into the computer system and later shredded, these would be the only pieces of paper involved in the entire visit. "When I went to digital X-rays in December of 2004, I was so impressed by how organized everything was," Girvan said. "I realized this was the way to go." As he soon discovered, creating a paperless office has decided advantages. Not only does it increase productivity by giving him and his staff instant access to everything from appointments to X-rays, it also improves accuracy and frees up the time and space that had needed to manually create and store files. "It saves us an employee since we spend no time on filing," Girvan said. "Kelly [Stanley, his receptionist] used to spend the bulk of her time filing, pulling files and refiling, then reconciling bills with checks from the insurance company, things that we now do in three or four seconds."
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