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Dr. Ross Girvan uses his electronic tablet as he speaks with one of his patients, Doreen Adams. |
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."
These days Stanley's duties include taking X-rays, showing patients to examining rooms and filling in for Girvan's medical assistant as well as creating and maintaining electronic files for his patients.
"She's doing the work of two people," he said.
Experts hailed the advent of paperless offices such as Girvan's about 20 years ago when computers went mainstream. While some large companies and government agencies were early adopters, it's only be in the last few years that the concept has started to catch fire.
According to a 2007 Rutgers University study, 90 percent of corporate memory still exists on paper, and a typical document gets copied 19 times, speaker Ed Graves of Stafford-based DBX Document Imaging said at a Fredericksburg Regional Technology Council meeting in Stafford on Tuesday.
"There are 4 trillion documents in the United States alone," Graves said quoting the study, "and that number is increasing 22 percent a year."
Such documents include everything from invoices and contracts to spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and the avalanche of e-mail that workers wade through every day. His advice for getting them off workers' desks and into a paperless system is to figure out how this information needs to be sorted for easy retrieval, find the appropriate software and then start scanning.
This can either be done in-house, which is the route Girvan's staff took during their downtime, or can be done by such professionals as DBX or ILM Corp. in Spotsylvania County.
Common pitfalls during a conversion range from reluctance by employees to let go of their paper files to not creating a case for going digital to changing the scope of the project once it gets rolling.
"You don't want to change things on the fly or the project will never get done," Graves said.
Afterward, the company should train employees to use the new system, keep the program updated and set up an electronic-shredding schedule for documents that don't need to be kept indefinitely.
As for Girvan, he's already looking to the next phase of going paperless: replacing handwritten prescriptions with ones done on his tablet. They can be printed out for patients or faxed electronically to a pharmacist.
"We can load in their existing prescriptions and it will help us spot drug interactions," he said. "We've priced a system and done a demo. We may add it in the next two weeks."
Cathy Jett: 540/374-5407
Email: cjett@freelancestar.com
