Buried in paper charts.

When Jamie and I purchased the dental practice, patient records were stored in paper charts. This included x-rays, clinical notes, charting, insurance records, demographic information, office policy form signatures, etc. Since the business was started by Dr. Mark Hofmeister in 1987, there were A LOT of charts (and soooooooo many staples).

This isn’t a totally unprecedented thing. Our pediatrician still has paper charts. Some of the offices at which Jamie previously worked had paper charts. The other night, I re-watched the Seinfeld episode where Elaine is trying to get a hold her of medical chart in order to strike her impertinence from the official record. Paper charts are all over the place in our society. It’s further complicated by state and federal record retention laws (e.g. Illinois statute requires dentists to keep records for 10 years as defined in 225 ILCS 25/50). We’re awash in a sea of paper charts…

In order to increase speed of access for our clinicians and reduce the administrative overhead required to procure the records, we decided to digitize our charts and attach them to the patient record in our new cloud-based practice management software (i.e. Dentrix Ascend). Ascend makes it super easy to scan documents into the system and pull them up for future reference. The premise seemed simple. Execution was another matter.

But finally, a year after we bought the practice, we successfully scanned all charts and attached them to the patients record in Dentrix Ascend. It was quite the journey. I learned more about scanner speeds, file size restrictions, auto-feed loader mechanics, and TWAIN drivers than I ever thought was possible. But I know we’ll be a better practice for it.

Now we just need to figure out what to do with all this storage space…