Hospital benefits from going paperless

Last year, Community Hospital in Grand Junction, Colo., leveraged conversion services to go paperless, with the goal of implementing electronic medical records (EMR) in line with federal initiatives. The business process automation effort "required hard work, long days and learning a new lingo," wrote Annette Saylor for Outpatient Surgery Magazine, but in 2013, the facility has begun to see the advantages of the conversion.

Specifically, staff are spending less time carrying out rote data-gathering and document management tasks, Saylor reported, which in turn frees them up to dedicate more attention to patients.

Despite the fact that the Affordable Care Act was passed more than three years ago, the implementation dates for each set of regulations were stacked. Indeed, the Sunshine Act, which requires qualifying medical entities to report their financial transactions, just went into effect at the beginning of last month. In addition, the march toward widespread EMR adoption continues, with doctors' offices, hospitals and other organizations in the healthcare sector facing eventual fines for failure to upgrade. 

At a time of such flux within the industry, digitization can take a load off administrators' minds.

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