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Medical charting has always taken an enormous amount of the cost of administrative overhead in healthcare. While medical dictation and electronic medical charting are starting to gain footing in medical practices, paper-based medical charts are still far and away the most common method of patient information recording. Studies show that they not only diminish the efficiency of your medical practice but they also have costs that you might not have even considered. Efficiency More than thirty minutes is spent on paperwork for every hour a doctor spends with a patient. That includes retrieving records, updating them, inputting medical dictation, and then re-filing them. With a centralized, accessible, and HIPAA-compliant re patient information network, you can put your patients back at the center of your clinical environment. The time spent charting patient information is dramatically reduced, when patient information can be input wherever patients are assessed, diagnosed, and treated. It also nearly eliminates the manual data entry performed by staff, which reduces administrative costs significantly. Mistakes, too, are significantly reduced when the middle step, where errors can be introduced by a third party, is no longer necessary. Storage In your state, it’s likely that you are required by law to keep all your patients’ physical records for at least seven years. This means that money is poured into cost of the storage media that you use in order to record these records, plus the money it costs to take up all that physical space either off-site or in your own office. That’s space that could be used in more efficient, cost-effective ways, such as extra exam areas, for more equipment, or to simply increase your office’s square footage. The cost of purchasing, copying, managing, storing and destroying paper charts all adds up too—and that cost can disappear when you convert to electronic medical records. Retrieval, Duplication and Transmission The time it takes to file, retrieve and then re-file paper records all add up considerably throughout the day. And then when audits or reviews occur, you need to collate all your records to a single location, an even more time-consuming and complicated process. And when paper-based records are required in multiple locations, copying, faxing, and transporting costs can also mount. The cost of paper records is more than monetary. Compared to paper records, utilizing medical transcription software is a rapid and more efficient method to cost-effectively improve patient care.
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electronic medical charting, medical dictation, medical transcription software,
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