What started with good intentions for digitizing medical records has presented greater challenges than anyone would've imagined. Electronic medical record systems have the great potential to ease the cost of health care as immediate accessibility of medical records and their transfer from one health center to another became possible.

However, what started as a way to stimulate the economy according to a recent article in Fortune magazine, quickly became a healthcare crisis. With reports of providers being more stressed due to learning new ways to chart, to injury and even deaths of patients due to software glitches, the healthcare industry was not prepared for what was supposed to be a technological advance for medicine.

One of the other disadvantages of the using an EMR is that the clinicians must change the status of the patient in the EMR by physically logging in each time to change the different stages of the patient visit. Many publications and papers are written on how inefficient that process is…having to log in and out each time to change the status of a patient means that the clinician has to log in each time to change at least 5 status changes during the patient visit, therefore taking at least a minute to log in, find the correct patient and then change the status. And, if a clinic sees at least 100 patients a day at 5 status changes, that is equal to 500 minutes a day dedicated to changing the status of each patient to complete their visit.

If all the clinicians would have to do is utilize their Expeditor light signaling system to change the status of each patient and it integrates with each EMR automatically, that could save a clinic 8 hours a day not having to log into their EMR to change the status 500 times a day.

The team at Expeditor are Lean Patient Flow efficiency experts that continue to find ways to make the patient visit as efficient as possible, thereby improving the patient's experience and satisfaction.