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07/11/2000 Lakewood, WA - When fire almost completely destroyed the building housing the offices of Matthew White, M.D. in early May, it was very bad news: tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage to the building and contents, and months of disruption to repair the building and move back in. Plus, the added disruption to the lives of his patients in this city near Tacoma.
But it could have been much worse. For several years Dr. White had progressively stored an ever larger part of his patients' records on an electronic medical records systems (EMR), which enabled him to easily restore his patient data - and thus his practice - within days.
Through the rubble, Dr. White's server was recovered. Dr. White utilizes Practice Partner's Practice Partner Patient Records EMR to document, store, and review patient data. "We were able to recover our server, and from it we were able to transfer our patient data to a new server," Dr. White recalls. "Because of our EMR, we didn't have to go through the whole recovery process that occurs with damaged paper charts." By having their patient data on disk (instead of on paper), Dr. White was able to restore his patient data, and his practice, much quicker than if he were using a paper charting system.
Had he been using a traditional paper chart, Dr. White believes that is would have taken months and thousands of hours of labor to restore the data. That is exactly what happened to the practice that shares the building. The other practice's sole means of data storage is the traditional paper patient chart. All of their archived charts were completely destroyed in the fire, and a majority of their current charts suffered water damage. "The other practice's current charts weren't completely destroyed by the fire, but a considerable amount suffered extensive water and smoke damage. Although these charts can be copied and replaced, it will take a massive time commitment to do so," explains Dr. White. "Luckily this was not the case with us."
The one silver lining to the fire - the building gets a remodel. "Because we are transitioning to a paperless office, we will no longer need a chart room. We are planning on converting the previous chart room into an office or another exam room," explains Dr. White.
Dr. White is currently practicing medicine in an interim office until his original practice space is rebuilt. Thanks to his EMR, he was able to get up and running as soon as his replacement computers arrived.
Seattle-based Practice Partner is a leader in the development and marketing of innovative Electronic Medical Records and Practice Management products for medical offices and large health care enterprises. Practice Partner, founded in 1983 by Dr. Andrew Ury to provide comprehensive software solutions for office-based physicians, is one of the pioneers in electronic medical records software. More than 1200 offices use Practice Partner software, and more than 700 of them use Practice Partner Patient Records. With over a decade of experience with the EMR (Practice Partner released its first version of Practice Partner Patient Records in 1987), Practice Partner has created software products that are finely honed to the real world needs of physicians, nurses, and office professionals.
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