If you purchase an EMR system for your practice, and it allows you to see more patients, it will more than pay for itself, almost regardless of price.  If it slows you down it will cost you an extraordinary amount over the life of your practice.  For the typical comprehensive ophthalmologist, seeing one more or fewer patient per day will gain or lose the practice about $40,000 per year.  For some retina specialists, that number may be closer to $90,000.

Let’s say you’re seeing forty patients per day.  If your EMR requires one minute more to document an encounter with a patient than the paper chart, that’s forty minutes out of your day.   In forty minutes you could probably have seen three patients.  That’s about $120,000 your practice won’t realize this year.

Clearly, speed is king.  When you look at EMRs, the question you MUST ask is: “How long will it take to document my encounters with patients?”  If the answer is “Longer than it takes with the paper chart,” you shouldn’t buy it.  If it’s faster than paper, though, it’s a great investment.  The system will not only pay for itself, but will make your practice a small fortune over time.

We’re all busy, and it’s going to get busier.  We’re facing a “perfect storm” of an aging population, more people with insurance, a relatively stable supply of eye doctors, and (probably) declining reimbursement for what we do.  There will be plenty of demand for our services but we’ll probably be paid less per patient than we are now.  Clearly, our ability to provide quality patient care to a high volume of patients will determine whether our practices prosper or fail.

Your charting system (paper or EMR) is the hidden determinant in how quickly you can see patients.  That’s because you use it for every single patient encounter.  Even a few seconds saved or lost per encounter gets multiplied by the number of patients you see per day times the days you work per year.  Over the course of the year, thirty seconds per encounter can really add up.

Whichever charting system you use, it has to be fast.  When I ask an EMR vendor how long it takes to document an encounter with a patient, “five to ten minutes” is not an acceptable answer (but it’s one I’ve heard over and over).  When you look at whether it makes sense for you to adopt a particular EMR system, that needs to be the first question you ask.  Forget the bells and whistles, speed is king.