Going live

We've fully switched. The 2 label printers and the card swipe are now installed. We're printing little labels to put on test tubes, and big labels for lab requisitions. We're all getting used to billing and scheduling in the new system. Checking people in today was slower than usual, so it was good to book lightly.

We tried clinical messaging (sending short emails back and forth between different people in the practice), which was kind of fun. I think that this is something that I will use more often in the future, as I stop using the paper charts. My secretary told me that I could probably start retiring simple paper charts fairly early on: once I enter the CPP, we can scan a couple of lab reports (eg, last pap), and then retire the chart by putting it in the back closet. We'll have to mark the chart as retired by putting a stripe on it; I'll put a note in the electronic chart that the paper chart is retired, and does not need to be pulled.

I used the tablet today, but only as a laptop. We don't have the wireless router installed yet, so I'm leaving the tablet on my desk, and accessing the internet through the wired network. I don't like the little red button mouse that sits in the middle of the keyboard, so I'm going to buy a wireless mouse for the tablet. Maybe I'll leave a wireless mouse in each exam room.

I've synced my PDA's calendar and address book to the internet so that I can access them from the tablet PC. I'm not sure how much I'll continue to use the Palm once I start carrying the tablet around; probably a lot less.

I noticed that there is a bar code on the vaccine boxes. Perhaps I could get one of those bar code readers like they have in the grocery stores, so that the vaccine lot number and expiry date can be entered automatically in the patient's chart. I run a flu shot clinic in the fall; last October, I vaccinated about 100 people in a couple of hours. Being able to scan the vaccine in would save a lot of repetitive data entry.

Michelle