AFRM’s List of Why Electronic Medical Records (EMR) Optimizes Patient Care

Why the physicians at AFRM have found EMR to be an asset in taking care of fertility patients:

  • Allows for sharing of legible records with referring physicians providing care for the patient.
    Illegible, handwritten clinical notes oftentimes compromise continuity of patient care.
  • Allows for accessibility of patient charts at both our Westlake and South Austin locations so that a patient’s chart is available regardless of which location that patient is seen at. In contrast, a fertility practice that uses paper charts has to physically transport the paper charts between their offices when a patient has an appointment at a certain office, and this increases the risk of losing papers/charts that are being carried into and out of a car, which increases the risk of exposing private, protected health information to the environment outside of the office. In short, a secure in-house server protects patient privacy as there is NO transporting of physical paper charts between multiple offices.
  • Allows for our staff at Westlake and South offices to consolidate the various components of patient care (clinical notes, embryology lab data, operative notes, radiographic reports and images, laboratory data) into one central, accessible electronic chart. Any component of the patient record can simply be scanned and imported into the patient chart.
  • Allows for clinical staff to have instantaneous access to a patient’s chart whereas the pulling of paper charts takes longer and can potentially delay patient care by hours or days if the paper charts have been misfiled.
  • At AFRM, we enter data into EMR between and after patient visits to not interfere with physician-patient interactions during the visit. We understand that the benefits for patient care and security outweigh the bit of extra time it takes for us to do so.
  • Other practices who argue against the use of EMR are simply behind the times and are not willing to sacrifice the added expense and time to optimize patient care and security.

We are committed to optimizing the care of our patients and the security of their records, even if that means a little added time at work for us — it is worth it!