Paper has long been a hugely important product all throughout the United States. In fact, already we use as many as, if not more than, four trillion various paper documents over the course of a single year – and that’s just in this one country alone. To compound that, the rate of paper usage throughout the United States is even growing by a projected amount of more than 20% with each passing year. Therefore, it is clear to see that paper is hugely important in the world as we know it, there is just no doubting this fact in the slightest. After all, the data that has been gathered on the subject also even shows that there are more than 90 million metric tons of paper produced in a single year all throughout the United States as a whole.
But taking steps to move away from paper filing systems, such as converting paper to electronic health records is something that most certainly must be taken into consideration. After all, consulting services have assessed that paper documents and paper filing systems are not necessarily the best way to keep track of things, something that, yet again, is supported by the data gathered on the subject of filing and paper usage. And the reasons to go through with converting paper to electronic health records and other paper filing systems to digital ones are certainly many, more than most people might even realize, for that matter.
For one thing, the use of paper documents wastes more time that would otherwise be productive than digital documents do. After all, it can take as many as five minutes to locate one paper document, where it would take only a few seconds to locate a digital document of the same nature. And while five minutes certainly might not seem like all that much time, it is an amount that will certainly add up when all employees are considered together over a significant period of working. Therefore, converting paper to electronic health records (as just one example) is likely to be well worth it at the end of the day and when all is said and done.
And when converting from paper to electronic medical records, any employee will likely find that less documents end up lost or even just misplaced. After all, such issues are most certainly far too prevalent when looking at the overall usage of paper documents, both in the medical field as well as well outside of it to boot. The rates of papers lost to paper filing systems is high, already sitting at over 7%. In addition to this, it has also been found that up to 15% of all paper documents are misplaced, though many of these documents will ultimately be found again. Either way, both lost and misplaced documents can end up costing a great deal of money – and should therefore be avoided as much as it is possible, to say the very least.
As clinical content consultants can likely attest to, converting paper to electronic health records is likely to be more than worth it at the end of the day. For while the process of converting paper to electronic health records can most certainly be a long one, there is no doubting that the outcome of converting paper to electronic health records will be more than worth it at the end of the day. Ultimately, converting paper to electronic health records has even more benefits than what we have already discussed (and those benefits alone are compelling in their own right, to say the very least). For many employees, often those working in the medical field, converting paper to electronic health records truly helps to make life so much more easy than what it otherwise would have been, therefore improving overall job satisfaction quite tremendously indeed.
At the end of the day, there is no doubting the benefits of converting paper to electronic health records, benefits that will likely only continue to grow and grow in the years that are ahead of us, to say the very least. These benefits will continue to make a different in our working world too.
