It's not everyday your doctor complains about his pains. Well, mine did, for a good half an hour. He is not a run-of-the-mill, your pulse is good you will survive till our next appointment, now get the hell out of my office kind of doctor. He spends a lot of time chatting with his patients. We usually talk about not eating too much red-meat or stress or something mundane about me. Yesterday he talked about his "pain".

 You probably heard that medical records are going electronic. Electronic medical records or electronic health records (EMR/EHR) is just a matter of time. Experts will tell you that is the case becuase big companies like Google and Microsoft has begun to invest a lot of money in this area. Most of the investment is for addressing the many problems EMR/EHR will bring along. If you have a decent amount of confidential or personal electronic files you are already familiar with some of these problems. The problem my doctor has is one that anyone would have moving from analog to digital. Simply put, what do you do with the analog data?

 Now that he is moving to EMR he has two records for each patient: all latest records are in electronic form and all history is still on paper. How big of a "pain" is this for a physician? Apparently, on average a physician has about 3,000 patients. Each patient, on average visists a doctor about 4 times a year. Doctors have to keep records of a patient for seven years. Each record, at the minimum, has two pages. So, on average a physician has to manage (3000x4x7x2) about 168,000 pages! This doesn't include any lab reports etc. There are about 600,000 physicians in the U.S. Apparently, there is no easy way to transfer this stack of papers into electronic form.

 The solution doesn't need to be fancy either. The minimum useful product just need to scan the paper forms, associate the records with that in electronic form, chronologically (just by year to begin with) sort and file the scanned pages. No need to OCR handwritten prescriptions (pheew!!) or provide search or anything fancy. Need to OCR date and patient name (or ID), however. Paper forms have a standard format is what I am told.

 The current pain is the following: Expensive and laborious to maintain some records in paper and some in electronic form. Having a foot in analog world and the other in digital slows down workflow when they need patient history.

 I have not done any research or even a search for that matter to see whether there are products/solutions to address this "pain." But, no one ever been so discriptive and quantitative about their pain!

 If your looking to solve a "pain" you might want to consider this. But, please do some (re)search first for any existing solutions. Please leave anything you find in the comments to help others.

  

 Sent from an iPhone.